John Muir’s “Stickeen” and the Lessons of Nature by Ronald H. Limbaugh (review)

Reviews 75 culminated in the 1989 conference on New Western History whose prin­ ciples Etulain’s work espouses and embodies. As in most books of this type, authors and trends are clearest when most remote. The section on post-regionalists is the messiest. Etulain’s categories break down for these four reasons: poetry and non-fiction have become at least as important as the novel; most historians have moved beyond the broad and compelling generalizations of their predecessors; artists, like writers and historians, have come under influences that are not specifically western; and frontier, regional, and post-regional works stand shoulder to shoulder and sometimes eyeball to eyeball in bookstores and galleries. But on the whole, the book surveys and encapsulates a large body of essential information for beginning students. It also has a good deal to quarrel with, which, to the more advanced, will be even more useful. ROBERT MURRAY DAVIS University of Oklahoma John Muir’s “Stickeen” and the Lessons of Nature. By Ronald H. Limbaugh. (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1996. 185 pages, $22.95.) Ronald Limbaugh admits that “Stickeen,” the story of the feisty little dog who accompanied John Muir on his Alaskan glacier rambles, has never ranked very high in the nature-writing canon. It is, however, “the only literary product from Muir’s pen that can be directly and extensive­ ly linked to ideas formulated from the books of his personal library,” and it richly rewards the close study it receives here. We have grown used to two images of Muir: the gifted nature writer with a “dynamic but overtly conventional message,” and the “radical activist” subsequently appropriated by the 1970s ecology movement. Limbaugh presents us with a third, more overtly intellectual Muir, a decidedly bookish man as familiar with his private library as with the glaciers of the Sierra. Meticulously analyzing Muir’s notes and drafts, Limbaugh places “Stickeen” squarely in the contentious intellectual debates of the late nineteenth century, particularly those over Darwinian evolution, animal consciousness, and animal rights. He shows us a Muir influenced by a variety of writers, most notably Carlyle—to whom several of the story’s sentences can be directly traced—but also Hawthorne, Scott, Coleridge, Emerson, Kant, Schiller, Swedenborg, Thoreau, the pioneering psycholo­ 76 Western American Literature gist George Romanes, and (possibly) the early animal rights theoretician Henry Salt. As a result of this intellectual cross-fertilization, what began as “a mere anecdote, told to friends as an after-dinner story over cigars and good wine” evolved “into a larger study of animal behavior and its lessons for humanity.” Muir came to see the tale as an opportunity to introduce radical ideas about “the moral equality of dogs and men and all other ele­ ments in the endless span of creation,” “to challenge traditional attitudes in an inoffensive way.” Limbaugh’s writing is lucid and succinct. Muir scholars will value this book not only for its argument, but also for the hard-to-find variants of “Stickeen” that it reprints in their entirety: the original journal passage upon which the story was based, the final manuscript version of 1897, and a children’s version written by Emily Swett Parkhurst. DAVID MAZEL University of West Alabama The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920-1930. By James Hutchisson. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. 276 pages, $29.50.) Renewed interest in Sinclair Lewis moves apace. This solid study treats the genesis, development, composition, and reception of the five major (and two minor) novels that Lewis published during his great decade of the 1920s. Along with five chapters devoted to Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith, Mantrap, Elmer Gantry, The Man Who Knew Coolidge, and Dodsworth, Hutchisson, in a sixth chapter, discusses the author’s “unfinished labor novel” and his capturing the Nobel Prize in 1930. The appendixes avail us of Lewis’s excinded chapter from Main Street, his New York Evening Post article “The Pioneer Myth,” his deleted introduction to Babbitt, Hugh Walpole’s published introduction to the British edition of Babbitt, and two less ensconced documents of the decade—Lewis’s notorious letter refusing the Pulitzer Prize and his cele­ brated speech accepting the Nobel Prize. Besides useful notes...