FROM THE BEGINNING, the westward movement carried with it much of America's transatlantic and colonial heritage. In 1758 almanac-maker Nathaniel Ames prophetically remarked: "So Arts and Sciences will change the Face of Nature in their Tour from Hence over the Appalachian Mountains to the Western Ocean." This conviction J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur also upheld in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Of course, most frontier folk preferred practical education, many even attributing book larnin' to Old Nick. Still, from the beginning there was western literary criticism–notions, talk, jottings about western themes, western writings, western writers.

Romantic literary criticism written by easterners treated such problems as the West's critical submission to the East, the dominance of Byron and Scott as literary models, the difficulty of describing western scenery in British English, the limitations of the Indian as a fictional character, and the conflict among regional reality, national identity, and the universal ideal. Critics out west also wrote about the isolation of western writers, the scarcity of western literary markets, and about the rivalry between literary centers in the West.

Early newspapers like the Pittsburgh Gazette (1781) and the Kentucke Gazette (1787) carried morsels of Addisonian criticism into the wilderness. They even empowered village "Lucindas" to launch into neoclassical pentameters and local wits to pen effusions signed "Agricola" or "Sylvanus." As early as 1799 Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810) precociously claimed that between the covers of his fourth novel, Edgar Huntly, were more ambitious ingredients than "castles and chimeras"–to wit, "the incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of western wilderness."

Who were the literary commentators at this time when criticism as an isolated profession was only beginning? Venturing beyond the Alleghenies to bumptious Pittsburgh in 1781, Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748–1816) left behind his gamecock editorship of Philadelphia's patriotic United States Magazine. A classic satirist and aristocratic democrat, Brackenridge the backlander wrote social and literary criticism for the Gazette. For "Tom, Dick, and Harry in the Woods," his goosequill produced over the years the first important western fiction–the popular and quixotic Modern Chivalry (1792–1815), a work which anticipates Bret Harte's picturesque local color and Mark Twain's picaresque realism. The Prefaces to Modern Chivalry and the collection Gazette Publications (1806) illuminate the literary goals and achievement of this Swiftian American, a transitional figure between Federal classicism and Jacksonian romanticism. With his Scottish literary roots still intact, his "Epistle to Walter Scott" lumpishly pleads for an American Scott to capture the beauty and spirit of the western country:

Here by Ohio's stream my pen
Gives image to a sort of strain
Which feeling prompts but Genius none,
So gifted to a native son.
My gift is only to admire;
In madness I attempt the lyre;
At hearing this celestial sound
From Scotia's hills and distant bound
Of this I dream and when awake
I read the Lady of the Lake.

Also sensing the red man's genius, starry Walter Channing (1786– 1876) disclosed in his "Essay on American Language and Literature" (1815) that the stumbling block to American literature was the English language. How could any writer, he asked, describe the majesty of the Mississippi in language made for the Thames? He boasted that the only language suited to the task was "the oral language of its aborigines."

Concerned less with language than with sensations, John Knapp (1767–1845) exhorted poets in "National Poetry" (1818) to take in the "stupendous frame of nature . . . feel its life-breathing motions . . . perceive its immortal complacency in the gleamings which break from out the hillsides and the plain . . . listen to its supernal promptings." That same year the Edinburgh Review, trying to puncture the literary balloon of the Americans, myopically predicted that "prairies, steamboats, gristmills, are their natural objects for centuries to come." But by defending America's "splendid barbarism," the rhetorical critic Edward Tyrrell Channing (1790–1856) paved the way for Emerson and Whitman. Channing opposed neoclassical straightness, smoothness, and harmony–effects, he declared in "On Models in Literature" (1816), "to bring the native of the mountains and plains, of inland and coast, to a lifeless similarity of taste." He keenly felt the descriptive freshness of Charles Brockden Brown's western wilderness. Similarly, James Kirke Paulding (1778–1860) honored Brown for breaking a new literary path. Still, critics like historian Jared Sparks (1789–1866), while admitting the pictorial gorgeousness of feathered tribes, viewed the Indian as barren of literary interest. To try making enduring song out of what he viewed as grim primitive uniformity was to him an act of desperation. Grenville Mellen (1799–1841), a North American Review critic from Maine, poked fun at the formula Indian–on the one hand a taciturn savage, on the other hand a red Ossian. He admired efforts to set tales "somewhere between the Rockies and the Atlantic" but reminded writers in 1828 that, after all, the author is primary, not his "theatre."

Of course, William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878) urged writers to exploit regional peculiarities. He read Cooper's The Pioneers as an American pastoral, a prose poem by our own Hesiod or Theocritus. Lines in Bryant's well-known poem "The Prairies" (1832) hark back to Walter Channing's complaint about the language of the Thames:

These are the gardens of the Desert, these
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,
For which the speech of England has no name.

Still read is Harte's Condensed Novels (1867), thirteen Thackerayan parodies on contemporary novelists. "Muck-a-Muck: A Modern Indian Novel" parodies Cooper's wooden dialogue, lumbering description, exaggerated civility, and social bias. Mark Twain, Frank Norris, and others later adopted Harte's parodic critical method. In "American Humor" (1909), a posthumously published lecture, Harte points out that western funnymen struck the note of modernity: great humor, however, goes beyond the topical and amusing to a belief in man's essential goodness. A future seriousness, he believed, would make the "inimitable" Mark Twain universal. Though Harte saw Artemus Ward as more platform showman than literary humorist and Josh Billings's eccentric orthography not funny, he again praised American jokes, tall tales, and slang in his last critical essay, "The Rise of the `Short Story"' ( 1899). Here he also assessed his own place in American literature as a pioneer for regional honesty.

Another literary pioneer, Edward Eggleston (1837–1902), pointed out in the 1892 Preface to his classic The Hoosier Schoolmaster (1871) that Harte's stories were "forerunners" rather than "beginners" of the dialect school. Tired of reading books about New England, Eggleston began his own novel under the spur of Taine's argument in Art in the Netherlands that the original artist works courageously with local materials.

Besides reporting on "dingy-paged volumes" in Ohio publications, antiquarian W. H. Venable (1836–1920) gave a lecture series in Cincinnati in 1881 on "Western Poets and Poetry." His appraisals salt the "desultory" sketches that make up his stout "ana," Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley (1891). Venable, who likes to correct wrong dates, sees literature as anything in print, but for old-style western criticism the student should read the chapters on periodical literature, on pioneer poets and story-writers, and on individual writers like Drake, Flint, Hall, and Gallagher. Venable throws the word "genius" around too freely, but soundly characterizes pioneer poetry as "either painfully labored and pedantic, or ludicrously explanatory and rhapsodical." He depicts much early literature as "semi-historical, semi-fictitious." Writers empowered to move the "lower millions" do not rank high with him, but he sympathetically quotes a letter from E. Z. C. Judson ("Ned Buntline"): ". . . To make a living I must write `trash, for the masses, for he who endeavors to write for the cultivated few ". . . will go hungry. . . ." Another Ohioan, frontier-reared William Dean Howells (1837–1920),

rendered in Literary Friends and Acquaintances (1900) his early attraction to the literary holy land of New England. But he agreed with Lowell, Hawthorne, and Emerson that the promise of a true national literature lies in the West. Thus the incessant western charge that eastern jealousy conspired against the interior was to Howells "feeble and foolish"–as was the western sentiment that acreage expanded the mind and rich soil warmed the heart. As man of letters and influential editor of the Atlantic Monthly (1866–81) and Harper's Magazine (1886–92, 1900–1920), Howells also championed other western writers like Mark Twain, Bret Harte, E. W. Howe, Joseph Kirkland, H. B. Fuller, Hamlin Garland, John Hay, Frank Norris, Brand Whitlock, Robert Herrick, Booth Tarkington, and Theodore Dreiser.

Like their "dean," these writers identified realism with democracy, probability, the average. René Wellek delineates Howells's main critical concerns as the objective point of view, fidelity to contemporary American life, the concrete universal, and didactic illusionism. In such works as Criticism and Fiction (1891), My Literary Passions (1895), and Literature and Life (1902), Howells recommended Russian, Spanish, Italian, and English realism over French naturalism. Over the romanticistic novels of Hugo and Dickens, he advocated the pure romances of Hawthorne or, better still, the verisimilar novels of Tolstoy. The American writer, Howells taught, must go deep like Henry James or regional like Mark Twain.

Mark Twain was a great literary critic, Howells remarked in a letter to his sister in 1906, "his praise . . . better worth having now than any other man's." In literary as in other criticism, Mark Twain (1835–1910) loved to pitch into flapdoodle. As a young Washoe scribbler, he parodied simpleminded Sunday-School tales and ridiculed the frontier stage. His well known parody in Huckleberry Finn–Emmeline Grangerford's warmed-over Wordsworth-Byron-Shelley ("Ode to Stephen Dowling Botts, Dec'd") modeled on Michigan's Sweet Singer Julia A. Moore–masterfully discloses the lady poetaster's heavy little hand: "the touch," Mark Twain elucidated in Following the Equator, "that makes an intentionally humorous episode pathetic and an intentionally pathetic one funny."

In The Gilded Age, Mark Twain refers to the popular American Miscellany as "that fatty degeneration of the heart." Like Bret Harte, he regarded the American short story as "high and delicate art." He suggested in his essay "What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us" (1895) that a novelist should develop his characters in association with a place he knows from long and slow "unconscious observation–absorption." In a famous letter (1884) to E. W. Howe, he praised the simple and direct style, the descriptive and psychological realism, of The Story of a Country Town, but also pointed out faults of sentimentality, intention, proportion, characterization, and grammar. Mark Twain's "Explanatory" to Huckleberry Finn (1884) takes pains to represent the vernacular precisely. As anti-feudal as most realists, he professed that false chivalric ideals–the Sir Walter disease–corrupted the South and started the Civil War. In his hilarious critical tall tale, "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" (1895), Mark Twain lambasts the Leatherstocking Tales for their "inaccuracy" and "improbability," and he even browbeats Thomas Lounsbury and Brander Matthews for enshrining Cooper in the academy.

Best known for his vernacular novel Zury (1887), Chicago Tribune literary editor Joseph Kirkland (1830–94) continued the Middle Border realism started by his mother, Caroline Kirkland. Of interest are two Dial essays. In "Tolstoi and the Russian Invasion of the Realm of Realism" (1886) Kirkland writes: "Photographic exactitude in scene-painting– phonographic literalness in dialogue–telegraphic realism–these are the new canons for the art of fiction." In "Realism Versus Other Isms" (1893), he issued a ten-word commandment: "Let only truth be told, and nor all the truth." The writer must be selective. "Morality, delicacy, and decency lie on one side of the line the artist must draw–immorality, indelicacy, and indecency on the other." Appreciating Eggleston and Howe, he also encouraged Garland.

Hamlin Garland (1860–1940) contributed inspirationally, courageously, and repetitiously to the raging debate. In the mid-1880s Howells had persuaded young Garland, reading philosophy and literature in Boston, to return to the Middle Border and write about it. Garland's Whitmanesque collection of essays, Crumbling Idols (1894), urges democratic idealism and veritism–"passion for truth and individual expression." Feverishly, Garland explains how painters and writers recreate not a scene but an individual perception of a scene. Thus truth flows from a particular self as well as from a particular time and a particular place. This "realism" (impression corrected by fact) Garland equated with iconoclastic "modernism"–the "present," "nature," "wisdom," "principle," "originality," "men and women," "sincerity," "democracy," "progress." Anathema to him was "tradition'`–the "past," "artificiality," "culture," "form," "imitation," "heroes and saints," "hypocrisy," "aristocracy," "stagnation."

Garland defined "provincialism" as dependence on the Mother Country, on British critics who sneer at Whitman and Howells. Among the riches awaiting western pens (subservient to no "overtopping" western literary personality), Garland points to lumbering, farming, railroading; to wheat fields, dun prairies, lofty mountains; to St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco. Pacific Coast literature (distinguishing between California valleys and Oregon forests) paves the way for other regions. Like the contemporary European novel, the American novel will become colloquial, shorter, more subtle. Though more truthful, it will become more humorous, more humane, than the French novel. Rather than crime, abnormality, and death, it will treat work, comradeship, and love. Art to Garland was autonomous, with parts subordinate to wholes, but his antipathy toward romantic artificiality makes finish, smoothness, and rounding out suspect. He believed that realistic drama, developing with the novel, would displace the old melodrama. But in America the grim Ibsen would be less model than inspiration.

Garland asserted that the stable elements in international literary history, even for the once-contemporary romantics, were local fiction, sincerity, and interest in real life. Western literature, he maintained, should differ from the "nippy accent," "nice phrases," and "balanced sentences" of easterners. From time to time, Garland declared, Joaquin Miller, Bret Harte, Joseph Kirkland, Edward Eggleston, Opie Read, and Octave Thanet have caught western life. So, too, have western newspapers–but not, Garland notes, dime novels. Paradoxically, the very life Garland wants depicted in literature militates against the creation of that literature in life. While praising The Californian, The Midland, and The Overland Monthly, Garland laments the poverty of literary markets in the West, but he discerns in the East growing interest in the cruder settlements. "Under the influence of Cooper came the stories of wild life from Texas to Ohio, and from Illinois. The wild, rough settlements could not produce smooth and cultured poems or stories; they only furnished forth rough-and-ready anecdotes, but in these stories there were hints of something fine and strong and native."Garland extols "lifelike" characters in such native plays as The Old Homestead, Blue Jeans, and In Missoura. Pressing his point, he even finds an old Hoosier farmer's parting from his daughter more touching than Clytemnestra's passion or Hamlet's death. More ridiculous is his assertion that Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dante, and Milton have faded into mere names.

He simply opposes any theory of literature not based on "life." With Véron, he believes that art should deal with humans, not gods. Besides Taine, he approves of such "forward" critics as Posnett, Dowden, Freiligrath, and Bjørnson. He is gratified by Lowell's faith in the present and finds "strange and powerful" Olive Schreiner's distinction between "stage" and "life" literature. Garland maintained that by attacking feudal epics and dying romance he really was attacking contemporary "fetishism" and "prostration." Literary aspirants should follow those who charged American literature with "vitality and character"–the postwar writers of interior America. No longer acceptable, Garland announced, were the literary superficialities of tourists and outsiders.

No mere sightseer, novelist Frank Norris (1870–1902), an early theorist of naturalism, viewed American literature from a western perspective. At the University of California he took Charles Mills Gayley's course in literary criticism and read George Henry Lewes's Principles of success in Literature (1865), practical advice on such narrational matters as experience, sincerity, and climax. As Norris's early ideas in the San Francisco Wave (1896) inform McTeugue (1899), so his later notions (1901–02) in the Chicago American, Boston Evening Transcript, and World's Week animate The Octopus. While big scenic effects in McTeugue contribute to the novel's grotesquerie, Norris's pictures of western grandeur in The Octopus support at least Presley's belief in the ultimate goodness of natural process. "The larger view always and through all shams, all wickednesses, discovers the Truth that will, in the end, prevail, and all things surely, inevitably, resistlessly, work together for good." Early Norris criticism not in the posthumous Doubleday collection, The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903), may be found in Donald Pizer (ed. ), The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris (1964).

In Norris's view America, confusing patriotism and national spirit, could not create a Heimskringla, Nibelungen, or Song of Roland. Though never a primitive people, Americans surrendered their epic impulse and their frontier experience to "traducing, falsifying, dime-novels. . . ." Norris described the precursors of Deadwood Dick and Buffalo Bill–the Leatherstocking Tales–as "the sodden lees of an ancient crushing"–with Cooper's Americans discoursing like characters out of Bulwer and his Indians (stalking through Byronic tableaux) declaiming like bordermen out of Scott. Lacking a national spirit, Americans, Norris declared, first must cultivate their sectional vineyards. "The West is different," he writes in "The Great American Novelist" (1903) "and the Pacific Coast is a community by itself." The new regionalism must provide more than the old local-color surface: it must depict the truth underlying a place. Only the delving writer strikes what is common to "Cowboy and Hoosier and Greaser and Buckeye and Jay Hawker"–bedrock for future literature.

True western fiction for Norris must reflect the spirit of adventure. Whatever the westerner's current garb, job, or lingo, his old conquering continues. Believing in progress through evolutionary struggle, Norris viewed the winning of the West as another stage in the doughty AngloSaxon advance. To the charge that the Wild West is dead and that the westerner is now as common as a lamppost, Norris in "The Literature of the West" (1902) replied that the desert, Indians, and courage still exist. He also maintained that many Iowa farmers and San Francisco businessmen might be in the West but not of the West. The true westerner in fiction must be an heroic adventurer, a dignified man of action, an indomitable pioneer. The western writer himself must be an adventurer, a hearer of nature's "majestic diapason" which sounds "in the canyons of the higher mountains, in the plunge of streams and swirling of rivers yet without names–in the wilderness, the plains, the wide-rimmed deserts."

Like Whitman, Norris praised both nature and technology–primitive nature and nonmonopolistic technology. The greatest threat to western primitivism, Norris felt, was not the machine, but eastern decadence. During the western conquest, gentlemanly New Englanders abandoned the theme to hacks by looking eastward to the Old World for inspiration. Norris's aversion to dime novelists was exceeded only by his contempt for bayside bohemians and precious Iron Madonnas. Even the messenger-boy who devoured dime novels was for Norris more honest than the circle of dilettanti who coquetted with Verlaine. Though partial to a manly writer like Kipling, Norris resented the flood of English books in San Francisco bookstores, particularly the yellow effusions of Oscar Wilde. Only literature capable of vulgarization, Norris felt, was lasting.

To gain literary success, the Californian "placed" himself in New York, but he deemed Washington Square no better than Washington Territory. In fact, he believed that eastern preciosity vitiated western strength. Thus he advised the western writer to create his own literary center–around a table, a sheet of paper, and a pot of ink: "Poems are now indited in Dakota, novels composed in Wyoming, essays written in Utah, and criticisms flourish in Kansas. A thousand and one little centres have sprung up." The hectic superficiality of an eastern metropolis offered much less than the lofty perspective of a Rocky Mountain village: ". . . Isolation, remoteness, and seclusion are preeminently essential to that quiet meticulous searching of the heart that goes to the making of a master work of fiction."

Norris insisted that technique was as attainable as romance. He noted with approval W. C. Morrow's course in California on the mechanics of novel-writing, for what the writer makes real is more important than what is real. Though Chicago lacked a romancer, Norris contended that there is as much romance on Michigan Avenue as there is realism in King Arthur's court. San Francisco was for Norris a pinpoint in a vast circle of solitude. In this city with its Nob Hill, Chinatown, Barbary Coast, the Mission, the Presidio, and Fisherman's Wharf resided "certain unhampered types and characters and habits unbiased by outside influences, types that are admirably adapted to fictitious treatment."

The critic, Norris thought, should be no less sincere than the novelist. Perceptive critics lived in Martinez and Cheyenne, but they found it harder to pen unfavorable reviews than to let loose a cliche like "a strong and vital portraying of the wild life of the trail and the frontier." Norris scoffs at inland reviewers who, instead of encouraging contemporary literature, lament the bygone age. Norris unrealistically held that in time the plain people would become more discriminating; even now the messenger-boy correctly judges Dime Novel No. 3666 better than Dime Novel No. 3667. Of western writers, Norris judges Eggleston "deeper" than Harte. He lauds Mark Twain's "humour," London's depiction of "life," and Howells's "vision," if not his teacup realism. Norris's "Perverse Tales" (1897)–"A Hero of Tomato Can" and "Ambrosia Beer"–are clumsy parodies of Harte and Bierce.

Though Frank Norris and Jack London (1876–1916), both romantic naturalists in California, never met, London extolled Norris as the novelist who had captured the spirit, luster, and wonder of the "great, incoherent, amorphous West!"Had criticism–London called it a "snap"–paid the successful proletarian storyteller as much as fiction, doubtless a recent collection of his articles, essays, prefaces, reviews, and letters on writing and writers would have been heftier. Judiciously, editor Dale Walker even admits into his little trove, No Mentor but Myself (1979), excerpts from Martin Eden (1909), London's semiautobiographical Künstlerroman.

Though London knew that passing honest literary judgment loses friends and gains enemies, he loved to teach, to offer up his ideas and impressions. His critical standards–imaginative realism, functionalism, sincerity–sprang from his feverish life and his wolfish reading of Spencer (evolution), Nietzsche (elitism), and Kipling (white man's burden). His primal frontier experiences gave him perspective. In "The Terrible and Tragic in Fiction" (1903), he points to the emotion inseparable from great literature: "Deep down in the roots of the race is fear." Charged by Theodore Roosevelt and John Burroughs with "nature-faking," London in "The Other Animals" (1908) argues convincingly that dogs possess rudimentary reason as well as instinct. In "Stranger than Fiction" (1903) he sounds an Aristotelian note: "one cannot do on the printed page what one does in life." He tells of a Sierra girl, a tramp, a cliff-climbing–all too improbable for fiction.

London exalted books charged with experience, individuality, atmosphere. Focussing on the political-economic forces in his 1901 review of Norris's The Octopus, London admires the "breadth" and "depth" of the San Joaquin Valley and its people. Inasmuch as Norris's "Titanic" imagination soars above commonplace realism, London glosses over the novel's copious minutiae. He discerns Norris in his poet-dreamer Presley, who resembles Edwin Markham only superficially. London's review of Markham's Lincoln and Other Poems (1901) testifies that the poet's "noble discontent" can sing more than "The Man with the Hoe" (1899). London reviews Upton Sin clair's The Jungle (1906) as "the Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery." In short, London simply panegyrizes literary imaginations that "LIVE, and spout blood and spirit and beauty and fire and glamor."

Owen Wister (1860–1938) also believed that "the wild kind is eternal." Wistfully, he explains in his preface to The Virginian (1902)–the novel that "fixed" the Popular Western–that Wyoming's mountains and sagebrush remain, but the last romantic figure of our soil, the horseman with his pasturing thousands, has vanished, never to return. Though the cowboy rides in his "historic yesterday," he is "among us always, invisible, waiting his chance to live and play as he would like."

Even though America had a distinctive literature, had Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, John Macy (1877–1932) complained in The Spirit of American Literature (1913) that it still was treated as a branch of English literature. In his Life and Letters (1910) genteel critic E. C. Stedman (1833– 1908) blamed dialect writers like Harte, Hay, and Billings for the "present horrible degeneracy of public taste." But in his History of American Literature Since 1870 (1915), Fred Lewis Pattee (1863–1950) devoted chapters to Twain, Harte, Pike Literature, and Miller. Pattee treated the National Period (Neo-Americanism) as a unity, showing the rediscovery of America in sectionalism.

In "Apology for Crudity" (1917) Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941) asserted that America lacks native subtlety. In line with Whitman and Norris, he writes: "For a long time I have believed that crudity is an inevitable quality in the production of a really significant present-day literature." Why, he asks, should we want to escape crudity? As in his tales, he communicates notions of the vagrant eye, the surface of things, and childlike responses.

After World War I the radical Young Intellectuals attacked Puritanism, provincialism, and academicism. Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963) employed a heavy-handed Freudianism in The Ordeal of Mark Twain (1920) to expose his subject as a genius thwarted–by his uncouth river life, his Calvinistic inheritance, and his wife's and Howells's censorship. But for H. L. Mencken (1880–1956)America's real literary center was not New York but the Midwest. The raffish Mencken abetted, among many others, Howe, Dreiser, Cather, Lewis, Suckow, and Anderson. Mencken also promoted The Midland, established in Iowa City in 1915 by John T. Frederick (1893– 1975). Patient and exacting, Frederick wanted no commercial romance, Victorian gentility, or local-color stereotypes. He wanted localism, stories with rich settings out of deep experience. His publication inspired the creation of Prairie Schooner (1927–) at the University of Nebraska and of Frontier (1920–39) at the University of Montana. In 1920 the Modern Language Association allowed the first section in American Literature.

Poet John G. Neihardt (1881–1973) was among the New Regionalists. While waiting for the wellsprings of the final Song of his epic Cycle of the West to flow, he wrote apologia in the tradition of Sidney and Shelley. Poetic Values (1925)–containing the lectures "Common Sense" and "The Creative Dream"–defends poetry in an age of science and pragmatism. Indebted to the orphic likes of Ouspensky, Coomaraswamy, and Korzybski, Neihardt drives home the practicality of poetic experience: heightened perception, insights for decision. As literary editor of the Minneapolis Journal (1912–30) and of a literary page in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1926–32, 1936–38), he played down pessimistic literature, played up works that teach people how to "live together decently on this planet."

Like Neihardt, the New Humanists often failed to judge the morality of a work of art as a function of its inner qualities. In his Turnerian anthology The Reintepretation of American Literature (1928), New Humanist leader Norman Foerster (1887–1972) noted that frontier influence now is "strangely exaggerated." Between 1925 and 1928 three substantial academic books treated frontier "conditions" shaping life and literary expression. Least critical is Ralph Leslie Rusk's mother-lode of fact, the two-volume Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (1925). With Venable's and Turner's blessings, Dorothy Anne Dondore (1894–1946) wrote the first extended study of the inspiration of the frontier on American literature, The Prairie and the Making of Middle America (1926). Her heavy labor of love aims for high generalization, but often bogs down in detail. Four centuries of description serve criticism less than ut pictura poesis. Though Turner saw the westward advance as counter to European influence, Dondore quite sensibly concludes that we remain heirs to Europe's past: a clean break is not only "impracticable" but "impossible." In her lively The Frontier in American Literature (1927) the crisply critical Lucy Lockwood Hazard (1890–1959) attributes "regional pioneering" to New England and the South, "industrial pioneering" to the Gilded Age, and "spiritual pioneering" to the closing of the frontier. She relegates the Aldriches, Stedmans, and Gilders to "cheerful yesterdays."

In The Rediscovery of the Frontier (1931), Percy H. Boynton (1875– 1946) applies the ubiquitous Turner theory to his own jaunty mix of social history, literary criticism, social criticism, and literary history. His opinion of Rølvaag's anti-myth-making is high, of Harte's meretricious sentimentalities low. As in Dondore, Europe is antidote to western provincialism. Thus he ranks Dodsworth as Sinclair Lewis's best novel: Sam Dodsworth's "We want everything that Europe has" means for Bcynton that our frontier spirit is alive and well.

This spirit enters into the socio-literary criticism of the monumental Main Currents in American Thought (1927–30) by Vernon Parrington (1871–1929). His concerns are broadly political, economic, and social rather than imaginative, aesthetic, and moral: "The point of view from which I have endeavored to evaluate the materials is liberal rather than conservative, Jeffersonian rather than Federalistic." Davy Crockett's autobiography is "the last pungent note of realism before the romantic revolution swept over American literature." Gladly, he takes up Garland's early frontier realism, but sees in Tarkington's smooth "neighborliness" a twentiethcentury version of gentility.

More literary background than criticism appears in the four Middle Border autobiographies and four chatty reminiscences which Garland wrote between 1917 and 1934. The same holds for Gertrude Atherton's Adventures of a Novelist (1932) and Mary Austin's Earth Horizon (1932). But critical positions are sharply defined by Atherton (1857–1948) in her antiHowellsian "Wanted: Imagination" (1935) and by Austin (1868–1934) in her pro-mystical "Regionalism in American Fiction" (1932) and in her earlier, controversial study of Indian poetry, The American Rhythm (1923). In Hey, Rub-a-Dub-Dub! (1920), Theodore Dreiser (1871–1945) called on the literary world to fight for social justice. In "The Folk Idea in American Life" (1930), Ruth Suckow ( 1892–1960) pointed regional artists to "the open corridors of the future." And in The New Regionalism in American Literature (1930), Carey McWillams (1905–80) scolded regionalists for shrugging off modern problems and finding little interest in proletarian heroes.

Marxist criticism prospered during the Great Depression. The revolutionary sensibilities of V. F. Calverton (1900–40) and Granville Hicks (1901–82), for example, employed literary criticism as a political weapon in the economic class war. Attuned to varieties of capitalistic exploitation, they measured a writer with a crude Marxian yardstick, gauging his utility to the proletarian. Sectional peculiarities and local mannerisms were subordinate to national issues. Calverton's oppressively reductive The Liberation of American Literature (1932), with its long chapter on "The Frontier Force," makes plain his aesthetic deficiencies. In his cramped view the social significance of Clemens, Eggleston, Howe, Garland, Norris, London, Anderson, Lewis, Cather, Suckow, and Dreiser outweighs their art. Calverton sees the ultimate liberation of American literature in proletarian collectivism.

More sensitive to art than Calverton, Hicks (with so many others) later became disillusioned with the Communist Party. But his early faith in the dull Marxian method gave his The Great Tradition (1933, 1935) the force and clarity that often accompany revolutionary allegiance. He gauges the socioeconomic relevance of Harte, Clemens, Eggleston, Garland, Bierce, Norris, Sinclair, and Cather. Hicks approves of efforts to depict the contemporary scene–in Dreiser, Anderson, Lewis, and Sandburg. He disapproves of Robinson Jeffers's symbols of despair. On the one hand, Hicks can complain about the "impassioned quibbling" of Yvor Winters; on the other, extol the "working-class consciousness" of B. Traven.

Far less polemical are two books of discerning critical essays by T. K. Whipple (1890–1939). Whipple contends that regions rendered in art contribute to national health. Spokesmen (1928), a study of ten writers and their environments, challenges Van Wyck Brooks's thesis about America's cultural failure. Future students, says Whipple, will reconstruct the lower-middle-class Midwest from Dreiser's novels. But Whipple has trouble equating the fat Midwest with Sherwood Anderson's penurious world, his underdeveloped settings far less visualized than Cather's, whose triumph over Nebraska implies for Whipple her victory over the Nebraska in herself. Unlike Cather's strength, Sinclair Lewis's power rests on the popularity of his "inert, thickly varnished surface," on his romanticism, philistinism, and vulgarity. Sandburg's "slabs of the sunburnt West" are "the contemplative stage on the mystic way," but not the "higher degrees of union." In Study Out the Land (1943) Whipple concedes that Henry James is more interesting than Jesse James. Still, in "American Sagas" and "The Myth of the Old West" Whipple has the temerity to declare that Zane Grey's "crude epic stories" are American equivalents of Beowulf and the Norse skalds.

In due time, Brooks's joyless Ordeal of Mark Twain was decimated in a critical walkdown by an enfant terrible from Ogden, Utah. Relying less on unity of projection than on unfenced fact, Bernard DeVoto (1897–1955) presented Mark Twain's America (1932) as "an essay in the correction of ideas." Unlike Brooks's frustrated genius, DeVoto's Mark Twain is a frontier humorist, a satiric realist working exuberantly in the native comic tradition. Two important early lectures–"Mark Twain: The Ink of History" (1935) and "Mark Twain and the Limits of Criticism" (1936)–appear in DeVoto's critical collection Forays and Rebuttals (1936), along with "How Not to Write History" (1934). Following A. B. Paine as curator (1938–46) of the Mark Twain Papers, DeVoto carefully edited and prefaced Tom Sawyer (1939) and Huckleberry Finn (1942), cleverly assembled and introduced Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), Mark Twain at Work (1942), and The Portable Mark Twain (1946).

Besides teaching English at Northwestern and writing at Harvard, conducting Harper's "Easy Chair" (1935–55), and editing Saturday Review of Literature (1936–38), Bernard DeVoto was a middling novelist, a PulitzerPrize historian of the West (1948), and a pugnacious critic of critics. In "The Skeptical Biographer" (1933), he describes literary criticism as "an activity in which uncontrolled speculation is virtuous and responsibility almost impossible." To DeVoto the literary mind was unfactual, incapable of penetrating the forces surrounding a writer–thus incapable of understanding a writer's work. If DeVoto saw the social historian as tough and realistic–as something like Mark Twain–he saw the literary critic as soft and sentimental–as something like Emmeline Grangerford. If you called DeVoto a "critic," it was a good idea to smile! A lover of "authenticity," he reviewed books by Bojer, Fisher, Rhodes, Steinbeck, Clark, O'Meara, and by another enfant terrible: Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951). When DeVoto declared in The Literary Fallacy (1944) that literature cannot abide folly and lying and that these should be denounced, Lewis, defending Van Wyck Brooks, generously complied: "Very well, I denounce Mr. Bernard DeVoto as a fool and a tedious and egotistical fool, as a liar and a pompous and boresome liar." Lewis's "Fools, Liars and Mr. DeVoto" (1944) is a celebrated piece of tomahawking. Less known are his bouquets to western writers like Cather, Fisher, Manfred, Horgan and Stegner.

Readers of Lincoln, Nebraska, newspapers in the early 1890s knew Willa Cather (1873–1947) as a "meat-ax" critic. ("Art is temperament and Hamlin Garland has no more temperament than a prairie dog.") By 1896, the coltish journalist had dashed off nearly a million words of criticism– available in Bernice Slote (ed.), The Kingdom of Art (1967), and in William M. Curtin (ed.), The World and the Parish (1970)–most on theater, only a modicum on western literature. When Mark Twain roughhoused some of Cather's favorite French littérateurs, she furiously announced that "he never will be part of literature." Later she changed her mind. Ecstatically, the young Cather plot-outlined Frank Norris's McTeugue in her 1899 review, rigging it a year later to her thoughtful review of Blix: Norris, she declared, adjured the "literature of nerves," possessed the "strength of the soil" and knowledge of the "feminine element," and–most important–made of his descriptions an "active force."

Of considerable worth is Willa Cather on Writing (1949), a little collection of mature essays, honest, serene, and powerful. Her aesthetic exclusivity is obliquely illuminating. With tongue in cheek, Cather warns in "My First Novels" (1931) that for settings Nebraska is "déclassé," Kansas "almost as unpromising," Colorado "quite possible," but Wyoming "really has some class." She informs us that My Ántonia followed the suggestive method of O Pioneers!–not the vulgar details of The Song of the Lark. Rejecting photographic catalogs, she explains in "On the Art of Fiction" (1920) that art should simplify, select the best details for the most universal idea. She despairs, however, of analyzing the individuality of a first-rate writer.

In the fragment, "Light on Adobe Walls," she objects to the exploitation of art by science or sociology. If a writer feels that his "little story" is less important to him than, say, the "Preservation of the Indian," he ought to be working in a bureau. "On Death Comes for the Archbishop" (1927) acknowledges the narrative's historical sources. "On The Professor's House" (1938) reveals that the open window in Dutch paintings of interiors inspired her to open a window from the professor's stuffy house onto the Blue Mesa. "How wonderful it would be," she declares in "The Novel Démeublé" (1922) "if we can throw all the furniture [of novels] out of the window." Finally, her Preface to The Best Stories of Sarah Orne Jewett (1925) affirms that the writer who gives himself totally to his material "fades away into the land and people of his heart, he dies of love only to be born again." This idea informs Katherine Anne Porter's ( 1890–1980) fine impressionistic essay, "Reflections on Willa Cather" (1952).

The strength of several well-known early studies lies less in impressionism than in biography, history, and bibliography. In Bret Harte: Argonaut and Exile (1931), George R. Stewart (1895–1980) shows how the writer's work grew out of the locale and how that work shaped the writer's life. Stewart observes in "The Regional Approach to Literature" (1948) that all literary works have a regional flavor, but that a work is distinctly "regional" when its location and social modes contribute to actual substance. Stewart's argument that approaching literature regionally makes "a better citizen and a happier person" may be true but contributes nothing to literary criticism.

Critical tidbits crop up in Southwest Heritage (1938), the pioneering pedagogical history-biography by Mabel Major, Rebecca W. Smith, and T. M. Pearce. The well-known, well-researched, well-written group biography of Harte, Twain, Bierce, Miller, Coolbrith, Stoddard, Mulford, and George–San Francisco's Literary Frontier (1939)–by Franklin Walker is critically deficient, as is his Literary History of Southern California (1950). What makes Walker's books, including his biographies of Norris and London, attractive, however, is his large talent for tying local cultural history to the national life.

For the Marxist-minded Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) the only serious theme out of the West Coast (stemming from Norris, London, and Sinclair) has been class war. In The Boys in the Back Room (1941), a little book fashioned mostly out of his New Republic criticism, he treats and maltreats writers who, however Hemingwayesque, have written of California from personal experience. Hans Otto Storm, James Cain, John O'Hara, Saroyan, Steinbeck–all suffer from theatricality, Orientalism, fakery, and nihilism. Wilson's J'accuse (recalling the plights of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West) points to Hollywood's "appalling record of talent depraved and wasted." In spite of its Dream Factory, California today remains a vital literary and critical force–though sometimes interior westerners envision without distress the ledge falling into the Pacific.

"Mr. Texas," J. Frank Dobie (1888–1964), liked to take potshots at Zane Grey Factories. He expected books about cowboys to smell of cows: thus he ranked Andy Adams's The Log of a Cowboy (1903) supreme. Much of Dobie's writing for the Texas Folklore Society, the Southwest Review, and Lone Star newspapers reappears in one book or another. Prefaces (1975), compiled by his widow, reprints Dobie's introductions to a wide range of western books, a few of literary import. His chatty appreciations mosey along, laying out a stock of hearty challenges, historical bric-a-brac, English literary allusions, straight-arrow biography, personal reminiscences, and sunny anecdotes–pieces as interchangeable as the parts of a Colt .45. Dobie points out that reading only "bully" sectional literature subverts sound criticism. It is more important for people to read The Trial and Death of Socrates than Fifteen Years on the Hurricane Deck of a Spanish Pony. But as he puts it in his highly influential Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest (1942)–revised and enlarged and packed with keen thumbnail assessments–"Nothing is too trivial for art, but good art treats nothing in a trivial way."

Dobie's zeal for the folk imagination inspired Henry Nash Smith (1906– ) to investigate the popular imagination. As associate editor of the Southwest Review from 1927 to 1942, he was well aware of the serious western writer swimming between the Scylla of sensationalism and the Charybdis of sentimentalism. Smith scrutinized the West through poetry, letters, journals, biographies, newspapers, histories, travel books, and dime novels. He writes in his celebrated Virgin Land: The West us Myth and Symbol (1950): The Western story has reached "the seemingly indestructible state of petrification which it . . . is apparently destined to maintain through successive geological epochs while subtler and more ambitious literary forms come and go." If his dime-novel distinctions remind one of Norris's messenger-boy, Smith's interdisciplinary finesse and serious purpose do not. He sees correctly that bad art–the automatic, the formulaic, the sub-literary–powerfully reflects and affects the popular mind and will.

Smith writes more clearly, more firmly, less personally than Dobie, more selectively, more logically, less peremptorily than DeVoto (whom he succeeded as literary editor of the Mark Twain Papers). With sustained perspicacity, Smith demonstrates in Virgin Land that down to and within the Turner hypothesis Americans identified the frontier with the myths of Empire (Passage to India), the Hero (The Sons of Leatherstocking), and the Garden (the agricultural Garden of the World). To this "objectified mass dream," Smith has brought the attention of social historians, historians of ideas, students of literature, readers who set store by the West, and an alarming number of Pop Culturists.

If Van Wyck Brooks projected America's sickness in his first career, in his second he projected its health. Affirming man's freedom and essential goodness, he rejected modernism, submerging himself in his five-volume Makers and Finders: A History of the Writer in America 1800–1915. In dense associational prose he picturesquely sought America's "usable past," relishing the warmth of little details. Three volumes contain a dozen chapters on western writers. Sympathetic to western efforts, he can provide no ideas or techniques for analyzing or judging a text.

The UCLA librarian Lawrence Clark Powell (1800– ) is a Longinian impressionist, a bibliophile apparently intimidated only by 451 degrees Fahrenheit. In 1953 A.D.–After Dobie–he first reverenced the Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest. Since then, Powell has habitually carted books to their settings while he breathlessly awaits the adventure of evocative fusion. For him a book must "breathe, be chromatic . . . full of murmurous overtones . . . pulsing . . . glowing . . . echoing. . . ." The critic resembles a cross between Anatole France and Fred Bason or, more simply, a connoisseur of bouillabaisse. His bookscape-landscape coign apparently offers him delight, escape, therapy. The method–obvious in such elegant collections as California Classics (1971) and Southwest Classics (1974)– contributes to Powell's lyrical, repetitious, gossipy essays. For Powell, "classics" are books Powell loves by authors beyond the pale. For an olla podrida of southwestern writers–Abbey, Austin, Lummis, Lawrence, La Farge, Grey, Horgan, Cather, Comfort, Waters, Long, Fergusson, and many more–he has chanted his praises and quoted their regionary descriptions at length. For most critics, Powell's public enthusiasm would be private precondition. And though his appreciations lack intellectual body, his passion for books is refreshing in an age of multimedia centers and retrieval systems.

Literary criticism for important western novelists–often mutual partisans–is an aside. The gritty criticism of scholar-novelist Vardis Fisher (1895–1968) is autobiographic and didactic. His massive novel of ideas– the Vridar Hunter tetralogy (1932–36)–treats literary-critical problems and is itself the subject in his essay "A Trivial Excursion in Modesty" (1942). Fisher's contempt for the New York critical "establishment" and censorious impressionists is clear, for example, in "Critics and Reviewers," a chapter in his unorthodox textbook for beginning writers, God or Caesar? (1953). To strengthen the moral will and destroy romantic illusions, Fisher the Encyclopédiste here musters de profundis a swarm of quotations from those "whose credentials none can question" and a multitude of harrowing personal experiences. For his work to survive, the artist needs "a good deal of mind." In "The Novelist and his Background" (1953), Fisher finds definitions of myth no more satisfying than explorations of the subconscious. He assumes some sort of correspondence, however, between ancient mythmaking and daily legend-making. The novelist's task is to perceive not simply the man in the child, but "the past which produced the child." By exploring the myths and symbols of tenacious human yearning he rediscovers the ancient's "intuitive wisdom." Again, much of this–plus his conviction that the artist's male-female components cause neurosis–crops up in Orphans in Gethsemane (1960), a redaction of his early tetralogy, now the final volume of his twelve-volume Testament of Man.

In his critical odds and ends, the important Northwest poet and novelist H. L. Davis (1894–1960) maintained that literature was a humanistic enterprise. He thus reproves Jeffers's inhumanism and approves of Ferril's humanity. The serious western writer, besides acknowledging the West's special problem, must know both the folkways and the great tradition. With James Stevens, Davis privately printed two hundred copies of the pamphlet Status Rerum (1927), a butterfly-hammering cause célèbre whose mocking subtitles run: A Manifesto, upon the Present Condition of Northwestern Literature: Containing Several Near-Libelous Utterances upon Persons in the Public Eye. Stevens and Davis in Oregon disassociated themselves from regional circles of "posers, parasites, and pismires" who produced ostentatious "tripe." In a less perturbed spirit, Davis in "The Elusive Trail to the Old West" (1954) argues for history's literary importance: perspective helps shape the western novelist's unwieldy present. The Civil War, Davis contends, disrupted the exciting continuity of the West's rapidly developing history and literature. Before World War I, however, writers like Roosevelt, Reming ton, Wister, and A. L. Lewis reached back for Old West material. The western writer now must first link the Old and New Wests and then link them both to the present.

Reno novelist Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1909–71) felt–like Robinson Jeffers (on whom he wrote a graduate thesis)–that primordial vision preceded intellectual constructs. Only by experiencing primordial reality, Clark insists in "The Writer and the Professor" (1962), can the right language find you. To think about the language puts you out of the creative and into the critical act. Essentially, American myths are old-world myths, rationally applied. In the Signet "Afterword" (1962) to The OxBow Incident, Clark explains that he tried to fuse the standard Western with "realistic treatment and universal theme." Craft serves vision. As he told John R. Milton in 1971, "landscape is character, not background." A reviewer of western titles–"good books by imaginative and entertaining writers"– Clark admired especially Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop.

New Mexico novelist Harvey Fergusson (1890–1971), however, looked upon Willa Cather as a tourist. He preferred Walden and Huckleberry Finn. Though apprised of mystical intuition, he remained essentially a ra-tionalist. His aesthetic and critical notions appear in the philosophical Modern Man (1936) and autobiographical Home in the West (1944). A Howellsian realist of sorts, Fergusson respected technological and social progress as much as nature and the past. Seeing literature as communication, he placed a premium on clarity, logic, objectivity, and frowned on sterile erudition, as well as on experimentation, subjectivism, and eccentricity. He disdained obsession with private psychology and cosmic relationships–for example, D. H. Lawrence's "neurotic" blood consciousness.

Another southwestern writer, Frank Waters (1902– ), has praised not only Lawrence, but Cather, Austin, and Clark for treating aboriginal ideas as "thematic substance." His reviews on "inside" writers like Momaday and Anaya are enthusiastic. Waters equates primitive archetypal intuition with organic wholeness and health. He equates modern materialistic rationality with fragmentation and sickness. Like Neihardt, he believes that art should reveal man's relationship to the universe–the interrelatedness of all things. The mystical view in "Relationships and the Novel" (1943), while admirable, limits criticism by its inclusiveness. Waters's criticism relies less on analytic thought and discursive detail than on poetic feeling and striking metaphor.

Waters, Fisher, and Clark are for novelist Frederick Manfred (1912– ) kindred spirits. Wallace Stegner sees Manfred the literary Siouxlander as "a natural force, related to hurricanes, deluges, volcanic eruptions, and the ponderous formations of continents." In scattered articles, reviews, prefaces, and interviews, Manfred favors historical realism overlaid with mythic patterns. The genuine western writer is in touch with Old Lizard, Old Adam, Old Leviathan. He loves sacred places, responds to dreams, listens to his own "tone." Passionate autobiographical fictions are not novels for Manfred, but "rumes." Fellow Minnesotan Sinclair Lewis exemplifies for him the ordinary talent lifted by emotional force and mental brilliance to greatness.

Montana's A. B. Guthrie, Jr. (1901– ), lover of the Old West, tells in "The Historical Novel" (1954) of melding "the facts of history and the magic of imagination." For Guthrie the historical novel must be authentic: "The little anachronism will excite a howl." Thus the historical novelist first must be a reader, a researcher, wise to nineteenth-century reticences. The single event is no more important than the "undigested mass": what is important is human response to event. When the imaginary figure and historical man collide, Guthrie wisely tries to make his creation "true to character." Guthrie quotes approvingly Whitehead's statement, "Style is the ultimate morality of mind."

Whether his style be rich or spare, writes novelist-historian Paul Horgan (1903– ), the serious novelist must create harmony, a realized sense of place, a story. The criticism in Approaches to Writing (1973), Horgan's spruce collectanea, is unsustained but seductive. Horgan eschews the self-consciously "modern." Delicately, he needles modish permissiveness, faddish relevance, vulgar neologism. Toward raw indulgence he is as ill-disposed as toward pedantic apparatus. Anathema is the "with-it" crowd, inverted snobs who slum in the Pop Arts. How, he wonders, can the artist hope for discussion of his works on his terms–not in terms of Marxists, Freudians, Existentialists, Blacks, Absurdists, Sexists, or whatever? The gifted critic clarifies subliminal meanings, knows what the author is unable to write.

Over the years the brilliant essays of Wallace Stegner (1909– ), novelist, story writer, educator, editor, and conservationist, have appeared in leading national publications. Three collections–The Writer in America (1952), The Sound of Mountain Water (1969), One Way to Spell Man (1982)–and one skillfully balanced biography of DeVoto–The Uneasy Chair (1974)–testify to his ability to dramatize criticism as well as history. Cum DeVoto, Stegner is historical in bias and realistic in intention. He suspects "beautiful" thoughts and academese.

A Stegner essay is a personal, fluid, metaphorical performance. At times it might sound a bit proud or showy. In "Born a Square" (1964) Stegner projects doing for the West what Faulkner did for the South– create a "usable continuity between past and present." Crimes against the land would be the West's shared guilt, hope its shared innocence. Models for study: Cather, Sandoz, DeVoto, Davis, Fisher, Guthrie, Horgan, Clark, Morris–and himself. Without a "possessed" past, the western writer, Stegner warns in "History, Myth, and the Western Writer" (1967), has only extremes: the no-present of constant change or the mythic petrifaction of the past. "On the Writing of History" (1969) details his preference for the middle ground between fiction and history over analytical exposition. Stegner has written finely on Harte, Cather, Fisher, Clark, Guthrie, and, of course, DeVoto. "DeVoto touched history with a novelist's imagination," he says in his introduction to The Big Sky. "Guthrie imagines his novels around a historian's sure knowledge."

As Stegner admires the explorative and literary achievements of John Wesley Powell, so the Colorado journalist-poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril (1896– ) values the wagon-train diary and the gold-rush rag, the explorer's journal and the scientist's log. "The hybrid vigor of cross cultures give greater vigor to the whole." A drama critic in the 1920s and a Harper's columnist in the mid-1940s) Ferril published his most important essay, "Rocky Mountain Metaphysics," in B. A. Botkin's Folk-Say: A Regional Miscellany (1930). In 1937 Saturday Review published a companion piece, "Writing in the Rockies." For Ferril "scientific wonder" replaces "low-grade mysticism." Even in a scientific bulletin wonder can give rise to genuine poetry: "Great winds blow in an atmosphere of stars." The reality of mountain erosion displaces the romance of mountain "eternality." Men supplant gods. Oscar Wilde's insight in Colorado–that mountains are unfavorable to art and poetry–Ferril finds superior to Whitman's "nonsense" about nature being a better artist than man. Mediating between science and poetry, between a western past and a western present, Ferril infects readers with the gusto of westering.

Living most of his life in the West, the maverick Stanford University professor Yvor Winters (1900–68) was a force both for regionalism and the cluster of attitudes before, during, and after World War II called the New Criticism. Like John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and others, he opposed impressionism and positivism. Lacking Eliot's Church and Tate's Old South, he erected a moral/aesthetic absolutism: a good poem is short, a good poem is in metrical or measured language, a good poem makes a rational statement about human experience. His Johnsonian contempt for obscurantism, decadence, automatism, and mindless experimentation is legion.

Without a usable system of evaluation, criticism for Winters was worth little. In Forms of Discovery (1967) he acidly counters abuse: "It has been a common practice for years for casual critics to ridicule my students in a parenthesis: this has been an easy way to ridicule me." He goes on: ". . . Six or seven of my former students are among the best poets of this century." J. V. Cunningham, Howard Baker, Thorn Gunn, and N. Scott Momaday doubtless were among those he had in his confident mind. Winters could endorse the intelligent detail in Theodore Roethke, but not the careless feeling in Robinson Jeffers. Of translations and interpretations of Indian poetry, he remained skeptical. On Indian oral criticism, he remained silent.

In 1944, Alan Swallow (1915–66) hailed Yvor Winters as "the greatest critic of the recent critical renaissance." Influenced by the Southern Agrarians as a graduate student at Louisiana State University, Swallow was a prolific reviewer of poetry for New Mexico Quarterly during the 1940s. A courageous publisher of a small press in Denver, he reprinted Winters's Primitivism and Decadence, Maule's Curse, and The Anatomy of Nonsense under the title In Defense of Reason (1947). Like Winters, he eschewed prolixity, loss of control, occultation–all products, he believed, of nineteenthcentury European romanticism. Though prone himself to occasional hyperbole, he cherished concentration, discipline, clarity. A purple passion for landscape was no substitute for technical mastery.

An Editor's Essays of Two Decades (1962) displays Swallow's interest in, among other things, literary methods, critical theory, and contemporary poetry. He notes in "A Magazine for the West" (1957) the lesson of the Agrarians, the Fugitives, I'll Take My Stand (1930), and the Southern Review. Sensing a literary flowering of the West, he suggests that the diverse western writers meet, find a common ground, move independently in one direction. In "The Mavericks" (1959) he envisions the dominance of the South in the 1940s–50s passing to the West in the 1960s–70s. Wallace Stegner, Harvey Fergusson, A. B. Guthrie, Jr., Forrester Blake, Howard Baker, Donald Wetzel, Mark Harris, Katherine Anne Porter, and Caroline Gordon have, for Swallow, a "speaking acquaintance with greatness." But here he touts Fisher, Clark, Waters, Manfred, Edward Loomis, and Janet Lewis–all "mavericks" on his publisher's list. In three essays he lauds Winters, for Swallow–before his rapt life was cut short in 1966–had hoped to infuse more of Winters's "rationality" into his program for western poetry.

Like Swallow, a growing number of literary scholars in the region resented the West's horse-opera image. As J. Golden Taylor (1912–82) was wont to phrase it: "The damned cowboy really had no license to ride his roughshod, gunslinging way over the whole Western literary landscape." Led by Taylor and Delbert E. Wylder (1923– ), a small group of scholars met at Colorado State University in the fall of 1965 to establish the Western Literature Association. Among writers and critics connected with the association from the beginning were: John Q. Anderson, Forrester Blake, Mildred Bennett, Paul T. Bryant, Martin Bucco, Benjamin Capps, Walter Clark, Philip Durham, Richard W. Etulain, Jim L. Fife, Vardis Fisher, James K. Folsom, Warren French, James D. Hart, W. H. Hutchinson, Herbert Krause, L. L. Lee, Robert Edson Lee, Merrill Lewis, Wilson M. Long, Thomas J. Lyon, Frederick Manfred, Roy W. Meyer, John R. Milton, T. M. Pearce, Levi S. Peterson, William T. Pilkington, Jackson K. Putnam, Morton L. Ross, Jack Schaefer, C. L. Sonnichsen, Max Westbrook, Don D. Walker, and Frank Waters.

The first number of the association's journal, Western American Literature (edited by Taylor and Wylder), appeared in the spring of 1966. In his editorial, "A Critical Forum for the Western Muse," Taylor announced: "When a scholarly organization appears on the scene sponsoring a quarterly devoted exclusively to the literature of the American West, a significant new phase in Western literary scholarship has begun." In the Winter 1967 issue Wylder editorially roasted some retrograde western critics who "insisted that all Western literature fit the patterns of 19th century local color realism . . . a pattern as stereotyped and stifling to creative growth as the pattern of Eastern publishers."Properly, Wylder went on to ask: ". . . How many courses in Western American literature have treated Western literature more as history than as literature?"

Indeed, the American Studies approach in such works as Roy Harvey Pearce's The Savages of America (1953), Edwin Fussell's Frontier (1965), Richard Slotkin's Regeneration Through Violence (1973), and Louise K. Barnett's The Ignoble Savage (1975) lends itself more to cultural history than to literary criticism, though nice discriminations of an aesthetic rather than social order may be seen in Robert Edson Lee's From West to East (1966) and in Jay Gurian's Western American Writing (1975).

Limitations of space permit comment on only a few of the betterknown contemporary western critics. Author of the Twayne Timothy Flint (1965), James K. Folsom (1933– ) in The American Western Novel (1965) sees western story as metaphorical–a parable of the wilderness-civilization, youth-maturity themes. Although Folsom's criterion for judging the genre– he uses "Western" and "Western novel" interchangeably–is closer to Hawthorne's concept of "romance" than to Howells's idea of "realism," he raps "insensitive" handling of western literary conventions.

To support his notion of western myth, Folsom weaves theme-and-plot medleys out of works "either esthetically significant or important in some other context"–in one chapter, for example, out of works by Guthrie, Sublette, Gardiner, Ertz, Scarborough, Ferber, Crane, and Richter. Though at times Folsom's generalizations are hasty, his selections arbitrary, and his prose jittery, his insights into Cooper's historical perspective, the metaphors of Garden and Desert, the relationship between the hero's skills and his morality, the literary Indian as noble friend or bestial foe, and the "grange? novel are compelling.

Novelist Larry McMurtry (1936– ) prefers the resonance of fiction to the "pseudo-fiction" of essay. Still, his collection In a Narrow Grave (1968) sparkles with detail and corruscating absurdities. "I can never be sure," he says,"whether home is a place or a form: The novel, or Texas." Unscornful of the popular Western, he yet notes its ultimate irresponsibility. "A lyricism appropriate to the Southwest," he slickly indicates, "needs to be clean as a bleached bone and as well spaced as trees on the llano." In "Southwestern Literature?" he pays homage but not obeisance to the three worthies: Dobie, Bedichek, and Webb. Like others, McMurtry relishes Dobie's Guide, its "terse, opinionated annotations." McMurtry holds that the Texans stampeding out of creative writing classes today must create dialogue adequate to emotional, sexual, and urban life. He notes that his own stories start with "the heart faced suddenly with the loss of its country. . . ." His bibliography recommends novels by Manfred, Algren, Berger, Humphrey, Brammer, and Eastlake.

As far as erstwhile University of Montana critic Leslie Fiedler (1917– ) is concerned, Eastlake, Guthrie, and Waters are for the pubescent. A masterful stylist, Fiedler finessed a major critical reputation by ruffling "straight" academics with his ingenuity and chutzpah. In the wide wake of Freud and Frye, this pitchman of the archetype can dream, intuit, convert, invert, alter, distort, dissolve, disguise anything into anything else. Dedicatorily thanking the Blackfoot tribe who adopted him, showman Fiedler in The Return of the Vanishing American (1968) transforms a job lot of literary, subliterary, and unliterary characters into Indians. This critical magic he also performs on selected "WASPS"–that feebly derogatory acronym Fiedler prizes.

Literature of the "funny" West is reduced to four libidinous myths: white man flees white woman, white man desires red girl–or boy, red woman is Earth Goddess, West is Earthly Paradise sans white Eve and red serpent. Incompatible works simply are not western or, like so many other things, are "anti," "crypto," "quasi," "hemi-," or "semi." New western fiction–its genesis in Hemingway's Torrents of Spring, its conclusion in the "counter-fantasies" of "Jews, hippies, acid-heads"–trips as easily into Fiedler's giddy pan-Myth Criticism as into his novels. In tune with all of this is Fiedler's cool invitation to psychosis–the real West–via hallucinogens. The anthropological quest for documented racial tidbits makes light of rational literary criticism, an enterprise the tribe of "consciousness-raisers" deems too "narrow. "

Earlier the orgiastic Beat Movement–nakedly exploiting and exploited by midcentury media–rhapsodically jeered at nonexistential literature, academic writers, and the New Criticism. Self-consciously spon-taneous, indecorous, and experimental, generational "members" swung down the beatific road to renewal via marijuana, jazz, and Zen. Not until Rexroth, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti, and Snyder–so claims William Eversondid the primary (Western) archetype reclaim its "constellated" voice. Cunningly concentrated, the subculture hero and California Buddhist Gary Snyder (1926– ) sought salvation in cosmic wholeness–in singing an idiosyncratic syncretism out of his reading of Blake, Thoreau, Whitman, Lawrence, Muir, Pound, Jeffers, and Williams and out of his experiences with peyote, shamanism, animism, nature worship, and other Native American and Oriental "wisdoms." His journal entries, book reviews, and poetic essays in Earth House Hold (1969) voice a Paleolithic poetics, a lyrical "medicine" of universal holiness. As poet-shaman and ecological revolutionary, the haiku-minded Snyder sees in wilderness/unconsciousness the source of unlimited spiritual energy. He espouses a visionary, organic, sensual, colloquial, elliptical poetry of liberation rising out of the "mythological present." But Snyder's practice of publishing poetry in book form manufactured out of unrecycled paper, though understandable, is not altogether in tune with his teaching that poetry is oral and that trees are sacred.

Another evident critic, John G. Cawelti (1929– ), has inspired scrutiny of ingrained patterns of popular narrative. His SixGun Mystique (1971) focuses on the protean construction of the Popular Western as a cultural phenomenon. With alterations of setting, characters, and plot, any story– so it seems–can become a Western. Again, literary criticism (as description, interpretation, and judgment of individual works) dissolves into his-tory, mythology, psychology, sociology, journalism, political science, and mass communications. But Cawelti easily convinces us that the "simple" Western formula has "complex" implications. Legitimately enough, he examines the formula in terms of heroic archetypes, dramatic clarity and unity, the media, social ritual, collective dream, cultural concerns, and games ("the fifty yard line is the frontier"). But surely the middlebrow Pop Culturists who detect high art in low art are mistaken. As L. L. Lee puts it, "Narcissus could not love himself better."

Before the upsurge of interest in western literature, John R. Milton (1924– ), one of the West's most respected critics, had published a dozen or more articles on the subject. Founder-editor of the South Dakota Review (1963–), Milton has edited also The Literature of South Dakota (1976) and prominent symposia, interviews, and conversations with western writers. His long-awaited The Novel of the American West (1980) integrates much of his best criticism since 1955. Used wisely, his classifications (for example, the startling catalogue of contrasts between eastern and western fiction) are quite credible. Though sympathetic to the Popular Culture movement, he rightly distinguishes among low, middle, and high orders of western fiction. He sees the serious western novel as "essentially pastoral," its highest forms representing the sacrality of the earth through myth, symbol, and archetype. Milton's chapters on the themes and techniques in Fisher, Guthrie, Manfred, Clark, Fergusson, and Waters are lucid, solid, and discerning. Finally, Milton contrasts the archetypal regionalists with widely read authors whom he views as concerned less with philosophical "unity" than with historical "continuity"–Cather, Steinbeck, Stegner, Horgan, and others.

The theoretical criticism of Max Westbrook (1927– ) has attracted particular attention. In "The Authentic Western" (1978), for example, he usefully distinguishes between sterile facsimile and vital denotative authenticity. As he puts it in his highly regarded Twayne volume, Walter Van Tilburg Clark (1969),the western writer is "obliged to know the color of the hawk's wings, the name of the small cold lake further up the mountain, and how to catch the trout that swim there." The book is informed by West-brook's influential earlier essays, "Conservative, Liberal, and Western: Three Modes of American Realism" (1966) and "The Practical Spirit: Sacrality and the American West" ( 1968).

Coining the phrase "American Sacrality," Westbrook reads Clark in terms of Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane and C. G. Jung's "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." Sensing myth as real, Westbrook (interested in the relationship between art and culture) notes that the sacred man must often feel absurd in a practical democracy. Still, Clark and writers like Manfred, Waters, and Fisher have struggled to evoke primordial experience in art. Westbrook's confident, tentative, leisurely disquisitions sometimes give the impression that he himself is scrutinizing literature on the verge of the universal subconsciousness, that in his ontological effort to fuse New and Myth Criticism he is playing ring-around-the-text with the shades of Kant and Jung.

Honored by many younger scholars, Don D. Walker (1917– ) justly maintains that western literature is part of American literature and that American literature is part of world literature. Through the years he has written many sophisticated essays on myth, the outlaw, the explorer and mountain man as literary heroes, and on Norris, Roosevelt, Wister, Cather, and DeVoto. As editor of The Possible Sack, he is a sharp critic of western criticism, and has even written a delightful spoof, "The Rise and Fall of Barney Tullus" ( I 968), on pedantic formalists and factualists.

Walker's essays in the historiography of the cattle trade, Clio's Cowboys (1981), point the logical and imaginative way to a genuine history of the cowboy. In pressing for a truce between history and fiction, Walker seeks truthful fictions. He demonstrates that Joseph G. McCoy lacks objectivity, Theodore Roosevelt glorifies the cowboy into a romantic abstract, the metaphors of western historians are more poetic than scientific, critics like Dobie and DeVoto read cowboy fiction as history rather than as literature, and that the improbable Prose and Poetry of the Cattle lndustry (1905) shows the cowboy as extremely free and extremely conditioned. To the contrary images of the cowpuncher as rugged individualist and exploited worker, Walker would apply "empirical rigor."Finally, Walker calls for the depiction of the cattleman as a social creature with a sense of his own past, his own "psychological reality."

The sincere and supple essays of William T. Pilkington (1939– ) in My Blood's Country (1973) recommend us to selected southwestern literature. Pilkington nicely points up the physical and spiritual isolation in explorer Cabeza de Vaca's Narrative. In unaffected detail, he holds up such underrated novels as Fergusson's Grant of Kingdom and The Conquest of Don Pedro, Waters's Pike's Peak, and Edwin Corle's Fig Tree John. Sensitive to Horgan's mannerisms, Pilkington yet acknowledges vitality in the western works. Noting Abbey's punch, he regrets his extremism. Pilkington passes novelist William A. Owens on his own criterion–"to make us see and know and understand a way of life."

The parodic western novel and the essays of Larry L. King and Larry McMurtry suggest to Pilkington that the literary southwest has come of age. Praising Jean Stafford's The Mountain Lion, he advises novelists to avoid "time-tainted. . . romance" and "simplistic realism." Author of the Twayne Harvey Fergusson (1975), Pilkington has written a number of introductions to reprints of Fergusson's works and has edited Critical Essays on the Western American Novel (1980), containing–besides his perceptive introduction and important essays by Milton, Westbrook, Walker, and others–a frank statement, "Western Interpreters" (1924), by cowboy novelist Andy Adams and an early essay, "`Virgins, Villains, and Varmints'" (1953), by E. M. Rhodes executor W. H. Hutchinson.

Essential tools for students of western literature are some articles and reference works by Richard W. Etulain (1938– ), editor of the New Mexico Historical Review. A historian, Etulain prefers to combine cultural history, biography, and criticism rather than, say, literary theory, literary history, and literary criticism. Admitting that Pop Lit is of more interest to the cultural historian than to the literary critic, he has written on a host of popular Western writers. Like other critics of cowboy novels, he relishes ranch lingo–Harper's "loosed its cinch," The Virginian "galloped" to the top of the best seller list, a region can "brand" its ways into native "hides." Besides writing such key articles as "Frontier and Region in Western Literature" (1971), "Origins of the Western" ( 1972), "Research Opportunities in Western Literary History" (1973), and "The American Literary West and Its Interpreters" (1979), Etulain has edited (or co-edited) Interpretive Approaches to Western American Literature (1972), The Popular Western (1974), The American Literary West (1980), Fifty Western Writers (1982), and the indispensable 5030–item A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Western American Literature (1982).

Through Etulain's Guide the reader interested in western literary criticism will find God's plenty. The work of western scholars and critics is published by both university and commercial presses. Many western critics have written books and pamphlets for Twayne's United States Authors Series, the Southwest Writers Series, and the Boise State University Western Writers Series. They also have contributed to such reference works as The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Twentieth Century Western Writers, and Fifty Western Writers and to such critical anthologies as Western Writing, The Westering Experience in American Literature, Where the West Begins, Northwest Perspectives, and Women, Women Writers, and the West. Western American Literature, ably edited since 1974 by Thomas J. Lyon, remains the primary journal in the field. Compared to the terrifying rhetoric of postmodern theory, western criticism still offers us the luxury of humane discourse. The story of this discourse has begun. And in the landscape of western letters, this ambitious Literary History of the American West is a salient feature, a landmark of monumental importance.

MARTIN BUCCO, Colorado State University