FEWER THAN A DOZEN YEARS after the closing of the frontier in 1890, San Francisco novelist Frank Norris observed: "The Frontier has become conscious of itself, acts the part for the Eastern visitor; and this self-consciousness is a sign, surer than all others, of the decadence of a type, the passing of an epoch." Like the post-revolutionary writers of the new American republic who viewed America's colonial past with a determination to build from it a new national literature, post-1890 western writers realized that upon the stories and legends of the Old West, they had to create a new literature for a region with a newly acquired self-consciousness.

By 1960, the West had its new literature. But as late as 1962 in his preface to A Country in the Mind, Ray B. West wrote: "The West is still, of necessity, pioneering." He added that "When a Westerner uses the word `pioneer,' he is not merely creating an image; he is likely remembering his grandfather." With that self-consciousness about the region's newness and its frontier days, western writers from 1890 to 1960 resemble in important ways the writers who created an American national literature in the years from 1790 to 1860.

Both groups of authors expressed their strong desire to create distinctive literary works to match the distinctive new character of their culture. Both occasionally indulged in a kind of literary boosterism, boasting their successes and sometimes overrating their more modest achievements. Criticized for such displays or (worse) ignored, both groups resorted to a defensiveness that some outsiders mistook for xenophobia or narrow parochialism. But because they knew they were pioneering, the writers of both groups created works that explore questions of national and regional identity, works of philosophical probing.

One group inspired by nationalism, the other by regionalism, they both sought to make local subjects and scenes the matter of their literature. In pre-Civil War America, industrialization, the Westward Movement, the debate over slavery, and the wars of 1812 and 1846, all had an effect on the writers of the period. In the years from 1890 to 1960, western writers saw the creation of the National Forest and National Park systems and watched as the plains turned into a dustbowl and farmers headed west again for a new start. With massive dams springing up everywhere in the West, conservationists–many of them writers–tried to slow the rush toward "progress." But most westerners agreed that a change such as rural electrification was progress, although power lines and growing smog made the price evident.

Economically, however, the West remained a colony of the East. As such vassalage was mitigated by the discovery in the West of vast oil fields and by the development of the new aerospace industry, westerners put aside the populist sentiments of the 1890s, becoming by the 1960s the most conservative of Americans. As in regions and nations in other parts of the globe, however, many of the West's writers did not follow the prevailing political drift of their neighbors. Indeed, in debates over unionization, con-servation, land use planning, and environmental protection, the two sides often seemed to be (1) those who recognized more than just a romanticized part of the western past and (2) everyone else.

Almost like people suffering from a retrograde amnesia, many westerners often seemed blind to the lessons of the past, as if they could not see the miles of gravel mounds left by dredge mining, the acres of hillsides eroded by overgrazing, the mountain slopes denuded by clearcut-and-run lumbering. Tantalized by visions of the American dream, such people seemed to believe not in the actual past but in the formula-bound Old West of Zane Grey and Hollywood. The tinsel West of such believers seemed to permit an escape from time: out of the present into the romanticized world of Riders of the Purple Sage and into a glorious future untouched by past mistakes and blessed with the infinite bounty of the western cornucopia. In contrast to westerners oblivious to the real past, insensitive to the present, and unprepared to face a future littered with old mistakes, the region's best writers realized a truth expressed by T. S. Eliot in Little Gidding:

A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.

Just as a distinctive–though not unique–American sensibility grew and manifested itself in the works of pre-Civil War American writers, so a western sensibility–distinctive, not unique–developed, becoming more pronounced in the period from 1890 to 1960. It was present in the westerners in the generation of American writers which Cady says was "held together by one thing: all felt and responded to, were perhaps tempted by, though none consistently or definitively committed himself to, the sensibility of a naturalist"–a generation that included the western writers Frank Norris, Willa Cather, Jack London, and Ole Rølvaag. Younger by a decade than those writers, Robinson Jeffers came closest to a thoroughgoing naturalist's point of view. By the 1920s, however, Jeffers and other western writers had also adopted a distinctive mode of apprehension that Max Westbrook calls Western realism ("Conservative, Liberal, and Western: Three Modes of American Realism," in The Literature of the American West, ed. J. Golden Taylor).

Two other modes of apprehension–which Westbrook calls Liberal realism and Conservative realism–preceded the Western. The fundamental distinction between the two earlier modes and the newer regional one, as Westbrook explains, is that "in profane realisms the conscious mind is primary; in Western realism the unconscious mind is primary." Western realism is usually a large part of the western sensibility, of which there are varying degrees as is also true of the sensibility of romancers, realists, and naturalists. Its vastness and its mountains prompting the writer to see life in the scale of geological time, the western landscape is the greatest source of the western sensibility. The record of millions of years written on the canyon walls of the West and implied by the ocean-like expanses of its plains and deserts suggests the relative puniness of the conscious human mind and the greater power of an unconscious mind moving in accord with the ele- mental rhythms of the earth. Not all western writers have been sufficiently moved by that suggestion to accept the primacy of the unconscious, but even those who are exceptions reveal a western sensibility in their approach to human history. With its origins in medieval Latin poetry, the ubi sunt motif is obviously not unique to western American literature, but when western writers deplore the eclipse of a golden age by a crass modernity, their laments have distinct reference to the special conditions of frontier life in the western landscape.

However much it was characterized by Western realism and by an expression of the ubi sunt motif, the western sensibility from 1890 to 1960 was generally that of the "square," the term that Wallace Stegner used in his essay "Born a Square" (1964) to refer to "a certain western innocence, even dewy innocence,in the teeth of the modern world" (Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature, p. 123). Almost twenty years after the publication of that essay, still convinced that "squareness" marked the western sensibility, Stegner said:

    The kind of western writer who writes modern literature immediately abdicates as a Westerner, and the kind who sticks to the western attitude is likely to be considered a little backward by the modernists. That dichotomy does persist. There are certain western writers who share common characteristics. . . . You could tell it partly by subject matter, of course, but also by manner and attitude. (Conversations, pp. 123–24)

A shared sensibility apparent in western writers does not, however, mean that those of the period from 1890 to 1960 are a homogeneous group. "Most of the great West," as Gerald W. Haslam has explained, "was so varied that variety itself seems to have been its major characteristic. We are faced with a semantic dilemma: we say West, and consequently search for common characteristics, when in fact we must deal with Wests" (Western Writing, p. 4). To cope with that dilemma, this part of A Literary History of the American West is divided into four sections, each focusing on one of the West's subregions. Each subregion has its own distinctive landscape and history, and a glance at titles of representative western literary studies shows that each subregion has developed its own body of literature: California Classics by Lawrence Clark Powell; Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest by J. Frank Dobie; The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier by Ralph L. Rusk; and Rocky Mountain Life in Literature by Levette J. Davidson.

So distinct are the West's subregions, in fact, that a few observers have contended that the larger region does not exist, there being no cohesion between the subregions. A brief consideration of the lives of a few western writers dispels that notion. Although most authors seem primarily concerned with only one western subregion, a surprising number of writers in the years from 1890 to 1960 lived in two or more of the subregions, and most western writers were familiar with the works of contemporaries from other subregions. Counting Clarence King and Helen Hunt Jackson among her acquaintances, Mary Hallock Foote lived in and wrote about Colorado, California, and Idaho. The next significant Idaho author, Vardis Fisher, was a professor for a few years at the University of Utah. A student in one of Fisher's classes, Wallace Stegner had traveled with his family from Iowa to homesteads in North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, and Wyoming; and since 1945 he has lived in California, where as director of Stanford University's Creative Writing Program he has taught students who are now themselves noted western writers, among them Larry McMurtry of Texas and Ken Kesey of Oregon. A Nebraskan, Willa Cather wrote some of her novels about the Southwest; and Frederick Manfred's Siouxland extends from his home in Minnesota to the Rocky Mountains. We find a Montanan, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., writing an introduction to Lewis H. Garrard's Wah-To-Yah and the Taos Trail, and a Texan, J. Frank Dobie, writing introductions to Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona and Archer B. Gilfillan's Sheep, Life on the South Dakota Range.

Clearly, there is a West in addition to the sub-regional Wests. Moreover, from 1890 to 1960 writers from all of the West's subregions shared a common burden as well as a common sensibility. Because formula novels about the West received the tag "Westerns," the region's other writers had to write under the shadow of Zane Grey and his legions. Wallace Stegner explains that "A principal problem of living in the West is that you get labeled as a limited regionalist"; and he adds:

I don't like to be called a western writer, simply because it's a limiting term, a pejorative term like "local colorist." But I certainly am not objecting to being thought of as a person who comes from the West, as a writer who comes from the West, and who writes from the West. "Western writer" is likely to make you sound like Louis L'Amour. (Conversations, p. 132)

The western sensibility survived the shocks of the sixties and seventies, but not without being altered. Westerners felt a new sense of loss–like the ubi sunt laments but more urgent–for now it seemed that we were losing our memory of the past as well as its glories. Lyman Ward, the narrator of Stegner's Angle of Repose, spoke for many westerners when he said: "This present of 1970 is no more an extension of my grandparents' world, this West is no more a development of the West they helped build, than the sea over Santorin is an extension of that once-island of rock and olives. . . . I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings" (p. 18).

The fear that westerners had abandoned their past was caused mainly by the upheavals of the Vietnam era. But the escapist nature of the popular "Westerns" and the reluctance of the non-"Western" western writers to be identified with the traditions of the region also played a role in making people like Lyman Ward feel that the West had turned its back on its own past. As the essays in this part of A Literary History of the American West demonstrate, western history and literature are still being studied, the anarchy that Lyman Ward feared has not come to pass, and the West–with most of its old problems and some new ones–is still here.

If the West is still here at the turn of the century, if we are fortunate enough to escape nuclear annihilation and ecocide, then we will be able to look back on the second major stage in the development of western American literature as a seventy-year period when western writers, having settled in to the subregions, explored the new regional identity. To understand adequately the achievement of those authors who wrote during the years from 1890 to 1960, we will each have to conduct our own search, leading, if successful, to the individual enlightenment that comes as the fulfillment of the cultural process. As T. S. Eliot wrote in Little Gidding:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.