Westerners, like Americans generally, have been unable to see themselves or their nation in quite the same naïve way they had prior to the 1960s, and contemporary western writing reflects an unwillingness to respect old boundaries, coupled with an enriched view of literary possibilities. If present trends are counter-cultural, they are counter-cultural in a generative sense, expanding limits, testing values, seeking the universal in the particular. Mark Busby sums it up: "The post–Sputnik, Vietnam, Watts, Wounded Knee, Watergate, Iran, Moral Majority years have been both a garden and a wasteland . . . , providing a wealth of subject matter but requiring a struggle for synthesis."

Western writers have been equal to the challenge. Whether it be established pros such as Wallace Stegner, William Stafford, and William East-lake, or any of the cadre of authors who emerged during the recent past– Sherley Anne Williams, Leslie Silko, Luis Valdez, et al.–western writing has increasingly defined American life. Protests to the contrary notwithstanding, American culture is moving west.

At the very time western writing burgeons, the traditional American book industry is sick. As James Sloan Allen points out, "commerce is consuming culture in the world of publishing to a degree never before possible or imagined, with the results that quality is being leveled, variety diminished, and tastes homogenized." Publishing has always danced between commerce and culture, of course, but what Allen and others, such as Thomas Whitesides, Lewis A. Coser, Charles Kadushin, and Walter W. Powell, decry is the degree to which contemporary art has become subservient to mercantile considerations: mass market sales, movie and television rights, T-shirt logos, and talk show prattle.

The dramatic and unarguable decrease in the artistic quality of books produced by the East Coast publishing bastion might seem an unlikely source of inspiration, yet regional publishing has taken up the slack and is thriving. Not only is more literature being printed as a result of alternative publishing, but much greater diversity of subject and form are to be found. William Abrahams, senior editor at Holt, Rinehart and Winston, acknowledges, in a candid assessment of contemporary publishing, "One bright sign is the existence of small, essentially noncommercial publishers who aren't struggling with a large overhead. Perhaps they can afford to take over publishing the small, serious books."

They can and have, fortunately, as the chapter in this section on "Small Presses and Little Magazines" makes clear. Moreover, western regional presses have proven to be both more responsive to local subjects and less frightened by experimental styles than have most eastern commercial houses, many of which still seem to consider Louis L'Amour synonymous with western.

Another obvious factor in the upsurge of western literary activity, increased regional sensibility, is itself a paradoxical product of America's inexorable homogenization. In perhaps belated recognition of what is lost when people move to cities like Los Angeles or Dallas that more closely resemble Tokyo or New York than Santa Fe or Sonoma, local writers, local editors, and local readers have reintrenched and reexamined regional roots. It is in small presses and little magazines that homogenization has been least evidenced, since they recognize that the universal is most clearly recognizable through the particular.

A particularly fecund development has been the literary output generated by the women's movement, for it has not only encouraged contemporary writers but has led to belated publication of earlier work. Moreover, as Lou Rodenberger points out in her chapter, it has led to a rigorous reevaluation of earlier writing, as it has offered new critical perspectives.

From such early artists as Helen Hunt Jackson, Mary Hallock Foote, Gertrude Atherton, and Mary Hunter Austin, through the accomplishments of Dorothy Scarborough, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Erna Fergusson, Katherine Anne Porter, Karle Wilson Baker, and Grace Noll Crowell, to contemporary authors such as Ann Stanford, Alice Walker, Tillie Olsen, Dorothy Johnson, Lois Phillips Hudson, Joan Didion, and Josephine Miles, women writers have been vital contributors to our region's writing; but that has not always been recognized and only the most naïve scholar would deny that contemporary feminism has forced a more candid, more honest appreciation of women writers. That a book such as Foote's A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West was not published until 1972, for example, speaks to the necessary revision of perspective recent years have brought.

One important element of the contemporary small press movement has been the emergence of feminist publishing in the west. Celeste West aptly points out that "ever since the printing press evolved from the wine press, it has been linked with renaissance and revolution." Audre Lord explains this impulse when she states, "One chooses the conscious route not only because it is more interesting but because it is the only way to be in control of events." Publishers such as Moon Books, Kelsey St. Press, and Diana Press offer outlets to writers whose work, while not commercially viable (at least not to publishing giants), is important, and the books they produce offer often-ignored visions of life in the West. As Linda Palumbo sums it up: Willingness to struggle, need for survival, exhaustion relieved by a sense of purpose–these characterize the writers and the feminist publishers who give them voice. Art is work; its working papers are literature. Tired, sometimes depressed, often horrified, yet capable of feeling thrilled, amused, and awed nevertheless, women writers in the small western presses embrace the ambiguity and paradox in their lives in the hope that it is through cultivating these qualities that we can hope to change the world.

So publishing, feminist or otherwise, is moving west, with coops of writers, some self-publishing, grants from various agencies, and adventuresome investors all involved in the upsurge of locally produced books. The existence of such outlets has itself led to new heights of autochthonous expression. The chapters in this section by Mark Siegel, William Lockwood, and Busby, demonstrate that contemporary writing is so rich that it is difficult to summarize simply. Observes James D. Houston, "Literature is moving in all directions at once."

Drama in the West, once solely the domain of melodrama–a form now adopted by television, frequently daytime television–represents one new direction. Innovative, exciting and unpredictable, drama parallels published forms in a number of ways. Writes Busby, "the real battle for western American dramatists since 1960 has been against the Broadway clawhold on American theater." He also cites "the growth of powerful regional theaters and the emergence of Off and Off-Off Broadway playhouses" as major developments during the past twenty years. In any case, playwrights such as Preston Jones, Sam Shepard, Ed Bullins, and Luis Valdez have created a dramatic tradition where once only class B movies roamed.

Fictionalists have moved away from the urban eastern paradigm that has dominated both post–World War II American expression and critical tastes, creating such diverse images as freeways to nowhere, kaleidoscopic hotdogs, and talking trout streams, as well as characters who genuinely care about life. All these things have emerged within an enriched regional context, one that expands toward the universal. As Delbert Wylder summarizes "western fiction has come of age."

Most startling of all, poetry seems to be exploding on all sides, with literally hundreds of journals devoted to verse now published in the western states. The growth of small presses and little magazines has been a major force in the publishing of verse, but a more compelling impulse may be responsible for the tremendous production of poetry: in a world increasingly aware of nuclear danger, ecological disaster, and the instability of world politics, art may represent one of the few consistently humane domains left; as Texan poet R. G. Vliet has written, "without art–and the practice of poetry is the most demanding of the arts–there would be nothing left, when all of us are gone, of our inner lives." Or perhaps Ed Hogan is correct when he suggests that the groundswell of poetry may "represent less a literary movement than one toward self-help or self-growth." Certainly the quality of published verse is uneven, and westerners are in no way immune to trendy trends.

In any case, another index of the will to survive, in the face of massive technology that threatens not only the environment but existence itself, has been a steady growth in concern for nature's fragility. The ecology movement of the late sixties and early seventies has given way to more systematic, less sloganistic commitment that is nowhere better reflected than in the abundance of high-quality nature writing now being produced in the West. If John Muir, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Austin were avatars of the environmental awakening, they have worthy successors in Barry Holstun Lopez, Hope Ryden, and Edward Abbey, among others. Thomas J. Lyon points out in his chapter that when "disintegration seems to loom, the call for accommodation [with nature] may become a voice of sanity and healing" to the general public.

One distinctive western genre has gone into decline in recent years. A sense of loss underlies Don Graham's chapter on the last twenty-five years of the Western movie, as he recounts first the flowering of the Western in several versions under a series of great directors in the sixties and early seventies, and then the exhaustion of the genre's popularity over the last ten years. Michael Marsden and Jack Nachbar, in their chapter on the modern popular Western, trace the Western formula through several media (radio, television, film and literature) and through a wealth of sub-genres that vary the classic formula. Though they too observe the atrophy of the Western in recent years, they point out the extensive and persistent power of the genre to engage the popular mind: "Over the last seven decades the American

Western story has fulfilled more social and cultural functions for its audience than has any other American story form. Indeed, the Western can be seen as a record of America's national self-awareness."

Perhaps the most interesting characteristic of growing maturity in western letters–along with formal experimentation–has been an expansion of literary subjects that has followed a rejection of the West-that-never-was, so-called "code" Westerns. For years, serious western writers had to struggle with the power of the fantasy West that so pervaded–and still pervades in some circles, as Marsden and Nachbar show–popular culture. Many contemporary writers poke fun at the old formula; few take it seriously.

The fantasy West had, as one of its principal characteristics, a lilywhite, nearly all-male cast. That was, of course, no more accurate than other elements of the code, and an important, exciting present trend is the growth of ethnic expression, as well as the aforementioned increase in work by women. Writers from all backgrounds–Lawson Inada, Rudolfo Anaya, Simon Ortiz, Annie Dillard, Scott Momaday, Diana Chang, et al.–are offering views of western life with an expanded cast leading to enlarged perspectives.

No longer much concerned with distortions of history, no longer limited in terms of subjects or forms, no longer dependent upon eastern publishing, western writers have matured. They have, as Lawrence Clark Powell has urged, tapped their roots, "the deep unconscious sources on which literature feeds. They reach down to the subsoil of feeling that lies far beneath the topsoil of thinking," and have achieved new levels of regional verisimilitude and universality as a result. They have entered the post-Vietnam cultural mainstream by shaping it to suit their own unique visions. Increasingly, searchers for the direction of American life and letters look west.

GERALD W. HASLAM Sonoma State University