A Literary History of the American West (review)

50 Western American Literature to the shot of a bow and arrow. The narrative arrow is still there, still dead center on the target. Now it has simply been driven deeper by a stronger pull on the bow. CHARLES L. ADAMS University of Nevada, Las Vegas WORKS CITED Tanner, Terence A. Frank Waters: A Bibliography With Relevant Selections From His Correspondence. Glenwood, Illinois: Meyerbooks, 1983. Waters, Frank. The Woman at Otowi Crossing. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1966. Athens, Ohio: Swallow Press/ Ohio University Press, 1987. A Literary History of the American West. Sponsored by the Western Litera­ ture Association. (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987. 1353 pages, $79.50.) In one respect A Literary History of the American West isthe culmination of two decades of scholarship within the Western Literature Association. It is the third major step in what might be called western literature’s move toward respectability, following the establishment of the association (WLA) and, shortly thereafter, the association’sjournal (WAL). Interest in the literature of the West is not new, but the early critical essays were not only relatively scarce but were scattered among various journals that only occasionally became curious about western literature. A useful point of departure for the present trend might be the annual meeting of the Western American History Associa­ tion in Oklahoma City, 1964, when a special session was given to literature. Alan Swallow, J. Golden Taylor, and I presented papers on western poetry, the western short story, and the western novel. Later in the year the three papers were published in the South Dakota Review along with a symposium including novelists Forrester Blake, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Harvey Fergusson , Vardis Fisher, Paul Horgan, Frederick Manfred, Michael Straight, and Frank Waters. Plans for an organization of scholars, writers, and students with an inter­ est in the West were discussed the following year in Fort Collins. The first issue of the new journal appeared in the spring of 1966, and later that year the Western Literature Association held its first meeting in Salt Lake City, with C. L. Connichsen presiding. This meeting and the subsequent four were held in conjunction with the Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association. The first independent annual meeting (“nice to be by ourselves,” we said at the time) was held in 1971 at Red Cloud, Nebraska, a site significant not only for its Cather presence but also because it marked the beginning of incur­ sions into the Midwest. Members of the expanding organization have exhib­ Essay Reviews 51 ited an increasing desire since the early 1970s to broaden the scope of western literature. If my memory is correct, it was in 1976 that serious talk began concerning a literary history of the West. Actual planning seems to have been under way by the next year, and after a difficult ten-year pregnancy the large and impres­ sive volume came to life in 1987. While the Literary History, in these terms, does indeed appear as a culmination of years of growth, dedication, and purpose within the Western Literature Association, it is also a beginning. In the Preface, Max Westbrook advises that “one of the major underlying purposes ... is ... to support the ongoing introduction of western literary riches to readers interested in Ameri­ can literature, culture, and history.” Almost gone is the defensiveness of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the anger and frustration felt by graduate students who were not allowed to write dissertations on western writers, including, in my case, Steinbeck. What was a student to do when his distinguished department chairman waved a copy of East of Eden at him and said smugly, “Surely you don’t think this is a good novel?” Our first impulse in those days was to fight, futile though the immediate battle would be. Later, we learned patience. Because those of us who were committed to western literature were spread widely over half a million square miles, we worked in isolation during those early years. Speaking to this condition in his editorial for the first issue of WAL, Golden Taylor addressed the “long-felt need for the systematic, pro­ fessional study of Western writing.” Since that statement in 1966, scholars and critics...