Great Plains Literature by Linda Ray Pratt

Abstract

Reviewed by: Great Plains Literature by Linda Ray Pratt Matthew J. C. Cella Linda Ray Pratt, Great Plains Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2018. 168 pp. Paper, $14.95; e-book, $14.95. Linda Pratt's Great Plains Literature is the fourth offering from the University of Nebraska Press's "Discover the Great Plains" series, published in collaboration with the Center for Great Plains Studies. The series introduces a general audience to various facets of the cultural and natural complexity of the Great Plains through a collection of texts organized around key topics; for example, other titles in the series include Great Plains Indians (David J. Wishart), Great Plains Bison (Dan O'Brien), and Great Plains Geology (R. F. Diffendal Jr.). In this spirit, Pratt's book offers the reader an accessible and thoughtfully structured literary history of the region. Focused on close readings of a representative set of texts—just over a dozen writers are examined—Great Plains Literature does not offer an all-inclusive overview of the Plains literary tradition but instead highlights how twentieth-century Plains literature engages with the rich history and the distinctive natural parameters of the region. As Pratt explains in the introduction, the book explores "the legacy of that past as it plays out in a contemporary society that both wants to forget and remember" (13). In this manner Pratt charts the legacy of the bioregion by consulting literary texts that chronicle the succession of cultural and natural changes that have accrued in the region from the troubling frontier era to the urbanization and rural exodus that characterizes the present-day Plains. The book is organized around a chronological series of cultural shifts that shape the region's history. The introductory chapter lays out the boundaries of the bioregion and presents some descriptions of first encounters with the unique landscape as documented in the journals of explorers like Henry Kelsey, Meriwether Lewis, and William Clark. In the second chapter Pratt explores the Plains frontier from the Native American perspective as she examines works by Zitkala-Ša, Nicholas Black Elk (with John Neihardt), and N. Scott Momaday in order to document the impact of Euro American settlement on the Indigenous communities. Chapters 3 and 4 focus respectively on the works of O. E. Rölvaag and Willa Cather and their [End Page 502] novels about the pioneers who worked to convert the arid grasslands into ordered fields of grain. In the Rölvaag chapter Pratt highlights the process of acculturation and adaptation on the Plains, noting how his trilogy about the Plains pioneers—and especially the first book, Giants in the Earth—illustrates not only changes to the landscape wrought by agricultural development but also "how the immigrant becomes American" through this work (45); in the chapter on Cather she notes an increasingly elegiac tone in Cather's Nebraska fiction as her protagonists, especially Jim Burden in My Ántonia and Niel Herbert in A Lost Lady, must confront the end of the pioneer era and the passing of the Old West. The fifth chapter looks at the social and ecological upheaval of the Dust Bowl era as reflected in Lois Hudson's Bones of Plenty and Mari Sandoz's Capital City. In these works, Pratt traces a growing social consciousness as these two writers engage the declining status of the twentieth-century Plains farmer, noting that, as she says about Hudson's novel, "the farmer is getting an unfair deal and needs to fight back against the rich men, the banks, corporate interests, the railroads, the government, and anything else that is trying to run American agriculture" (89). This "unfair deal" is one of the factors contributing to the massive depopulation of the deep rural Plains and the movement to metropolitan centers on the region's edges. Chapter 6 focuses on this urbanization and industrialization in the region as reflected in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio, Meridel LeSeur's The Girl, and Rilla Askew's Fire in Beulah; collectively, these novels expose the class- and race-based tensions that many citizens of the Plains—especially the disenfranchised—face in the city. In the final chapter Pratt looks at Ted Kooser's poetry, Kent Haruf...