Western Writers Series Numbers 1 and 6-10, ed. by Wayne Chatterton, James H. Maguire (review)

312 Western American Literature Boise State University Western Writers Series. Wayne Chatterton and James H. Maguire, general editors. Each booklet $1.50. #1: VARDIS FISHER: THE FRONTIER AND REGIONAL WORKS by Wayne Chatterton, 1972, 51p #6: THOMAS HORNSBY FERRIL by A. Thomas Truskv, 1973, 52p #7 OWEN WISTER by Richard W. Etulain, 1973, 50p #8: WALTER VAN TILBURG CLARK by L. L. Lee, 1973, 60p #9: N. SCOTT MOMADAY by Martha Scott Trimble, 1973, 46p #10: PLAINS INDIAN AUTOBIOGRAPHIES by Lynne Woods O’Brien, 1973, 48p The history books tell us that there is a vast American region called The West. It is not only a geography, but a state of mind and it has been with us for a long time, in both phases. There have even been theories devised that insist (see Turner’s frontier thesis) that Westering has made us what we are today. You would think that this wonderful country would have attracted novelists, poets, and essayists and inspired them to an epic style, in the some grandiose proportions as the other settlers, who swarmed across the wide Mississippi. Yet if you read American literary criticism, as turned out by the Eastern Establishment, you might come to the conclusion that this ain’t so. Washington Irving and Mark Twain, of course, did set the fashion of writing sight-seeing narratives about the West but they went back home again. They knew that East of the Mississippi was the place to stay if you wanted to qualify as a classic American author. Later on, you could try to sneak in the back door by assigning yourself to the San Francisco region, that being the most Eastern of Western cities. But . . . you didn’t rate. By and large, if you wrote about the West, you wrote “Westerns” and these were too popular to rate as classics. Or, if you didn’t write oaters, but turned out something more elegant, you were credited with an historical romance. But this was still a far cry from the Great American Novel. As for poets, Neihardt couldn’t compare to Long­ fellow, who rated as popular but classic, because he came from New England. The five pamphlets under review here give a fair sampling of the variety and literary range of the writers under consideration, which is inclusive. Vardis Fisher, for example, is scarcely considered a regional writer because his reputation is so widely known. The richness of Native American oral traditions is rescued from anonymity in the pamphlet, Plains Indian Autobiographies. In general, the pamphlets are pithy in style and factual in their presen­ Reviews 313 tations, for a lot has to be packed into fifty pages, including a bibliography of primary and secondary sources. They are thus extremely useful, although readers will have to go elsewhere for greater depth of critical detail. Yet critical judgment is there, even though it has to be succinct. Richard W. Etulain, for example, devotes only four pages to discussing Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902). Yet he manages not only to place this first cowboy novel in literary history, but interpret Wister’s attitudes towards the West and describe how The Virginian, further, reflects the cultural tensions of the Turn-of-the-Century era. That’s a tall order, biography, literary history, and critical evaluation. Yet the writers in the series manage to cram it all in. In brief, Wayne Ghatterton sets the tempo for the entire series with his Vardis Fisher Pamphlet (#1). Writing with psychological understand­ ing of the forces in Fisher’s life, Chatterton then goes on to relate these forces to his variety of writings ,interweaving his own judgments with those of other critics, both pro and con. A. Thomas Trusky struggles too long, perhaps, with the reasons why Thomas Hornsby Ferril (Pamphlet #6) is a relatively unknown regionalist, but then goes on to do justice to his development as a poet and essayist. L. L. Lee chooses to focus on Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s vision and its ambiguity (Pamplet #8). Here, biography and analysis are interwoven as Lee tries to understand not only Clark as a writer but the tragedy of Clark as a man, a factor which...