Review Brian Booth Glen A. Love Davis Country: H.L. Davis's Northwest Oregon State University Press , Corvallis , 2009 . Photographs, bibliography. 320 pages. $$22.95 paper.

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 2 cannery operators on the Nass River, outside state jurisdiction. Landing Native Fisheries is a deeply researched and engaging text that places British Columbia’s history into a larger imperial legal context and would be of interest to legal scholars and practitioners, historians, Indigenous communities, and fishers on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border. Harris brings to light the regulatory regimes developed during the period of state formation and consolidation that wrested control of the fisheries from Indigenous peoples and undermined a highly successful fish-based economy. At the same time,his examination of the province’s“reserve geography” points to the implicit recognition by the early state of the importance of fisheries to Indigenous economies and of theAboriginal righttofish.LandingNativeFisheries bringsfish and water to the forefront of a scholarship that has emphasized the dispossession of land and territory. As the spokesperson for the Allied Tribes of British Columbia Peter Kelly stated in 1923, “The fishing question . . . is a burning one” (p. 183). Susan Roy University of British Columbia Davis Country: H.L. Davis’s Northwest edited by Brian Booth and Glen A. Love Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2009. Photographs, bibliography. 320 pages. $22.95 paper. Ask Oregon readers which Oregon writer won a Pulitzer Prize. After guessing Ken Kesey or Ursula LeGuin, they often give up. Few northwesterners know of H.L.Davis and his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Honey in the Horn (1935). Even some librarians in Davis’s home regions of Roseburg and The Dalles fail to recognize him.And to everyone’s loss,nearly all his work is out of print. But the volume under review, a superb Davis sampler, could reignite interest in this front-rank Oregon, Pacific Northwest, western writer. How satisfying if this valuable collection would become an“Everyone Reads” selection to return Davis to regional readers. Brian Booth and Glen A.Love are ideal editors for Davis Country: H.L. Davis’s Northwest. Booth, a book lover nonpareil and founder of the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts, hails from Douglas County, Davis’s natal home. Love is a leading authority on Pacific Northwest literature, with previous work on Davis and Don Berry and pathbreaking essays on eco-criticism, the study of literary-ecological connections, among his scholarly credits. Booth and Love bring together here a top-shelf gathering of Davis’s works. After a brief volume introduction, they include a short autobiographical piece and comments on Davis by two friends. The next section, the most important and extensive section of the anthology, gathers the three opening chapters of Honey in the Horn and ten of Davis’s essays and short stories. Next are nine of Davis’s poems and nine of his lively letters to literary friends and a relative. Closing out the volume are one superlative chapter from Davis’s Winds of Morning (1952), excerpts from and comments by coeditor Love on Davis’s final, unpublished novel Exit, Pursued by a Bear, a brief Davis bibliography, and abbreviated editorial comments.Each of the major sections carries a short, very helpful biographicalthematic introduction. For historians, H.L. Davis misleads as well as aids understanding of the Northwest past. First, his focus was very narrow — mainly the Oregon outback he knew firsthand in the Roseburg-Oakland and The Dalles–eastern Oregon subregions.One would not know from Davis’s writings that Oregon and Washington were half urban by the late 1930s. Rural life on farms, ranches, and isolated hamlets and the lives of sheepherders and horse wranglers dominate his fiction and essays. Only a few scattered references deal with a majority of  Reviews northwesterners in towns and cities of more than 2,500. Conversely,Davis is a first-rate specimen for understanding the literary history of the Pacific Northwest. Along with authors James Stevens and Vardis Fisher and editor H.G. Merriam, Davis was a major current in the flood of literary regionalism that washed across the region in the 1920s and 1930s. Davis broke clearly and contentiously from the suffocating romanticism that held in thrall writers like Frederic Homer Balch in his novel Bridge of the Gods (1890) and other writers and teachers. Davis and...