248 Western American Literature The first twentieth century writer to appear is Willa Cather, who, Mor ris believes, is less modern than Crane. Her spiritual home, and the source of her finest images, is with the Pueblo Indian of the Southwest. The long est chapter in the book is devoted to another woman, Gertrude Stein, who, despite the small number of her readers, contributed so much to the Ameri can language in the way of image-making material. Two male writers con temporary with Cather and Stein — Sherwood Anderson and Ring Lardner — represent for Morris the idiom of rural and urban America respectively. Anderson is associated with the image of long summer twilights in the Mid west, while Lardner fashions an “artless-seeming” but “crafty” imagery from the language of the ball parks and the city streets. Katherine Anne Porter is clearly a favorite of Morris, who finds the “vernacular texture of life” flawlessly recorded in her fiction, which is in formed by her recognition of “the downward path to wisdom.” But the “liberating power of the vernacular as an image-maker” is perhaps best illustrated by the work of four major figures of “the remarkable decades between the wars” — Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Faulkner and Hemingway. Fitzgerald and Hemingway represent the “extremes of sentiment, expressed and suppressed,” while their numerous contemporaries fall between these extremes. The three most recent writers to be treated are Richard Wright, James Agee and Carson McCullers, each in a way a special case, but each contributing to the imagery of the vernacular While he may strain just a bit to fit some of the writers into his pat tern, Morris clearly knows and appreciates the work of all his subjects. His thesis is both plausible and exciting He has added an important chap ter to the extensive criticism of the realistic movement in America. ROBERT D. HARPER, Estes Park, Colorado Wind in the Rock. By Ann Zwinger. (New York: Harper and Row, 1978. 258 pages, $15.00.) Ann Zwinger structures this book by narrating her journeys, usually with guides, of five canyons on the San Juan River. Her strategy: to show the value of all such wild canyon country by dramatizing the human growth she gains in her personal experiences of such a region. In her view, the canyons in and surrounding the Grand Gulch Primi tive Area (administered by the Bureau of Land Management) are beautiful in and of themselves as landscape; but appreciation of the region is enhanced by a knowledge of biology and geology, ancient indigenous cultures, and more recent Mormon history. She does not pretend to be an expert in any Reviews 249 of these fields, though her bibliographical notes demonstrate her extensive reading about the region. However, she applies the tools of science, history, and anthropology fancifully, pretending frequently; for instance, she imag ines she is an ancient potter: “And I feel joy. I might have no word for ‘joy’ but that is what I know. Contentment.” (p. 91) On most occasions this fanciful “getting into the scene” becomes precious, and vulgar, rather than shedding light on the significance of the landscape. The area itself is everything she claims it is. Two women I know recently returned from a four-day walk down Owl Creek (a canyon Zwinger never mentions), smiling, suntanned, talking ecstatically about the won derful landscape, the mysterious ruins, many seemingly untouched since they were abandoned. They agree that the area deserves a book, but they doubt that Zwinger’s book lives up to the glory of the area. Where, then, does the book fail? Probably in its inability to live up to its intentions. There are certain conventions which appear in narratives like this which attempt to convey the spirit of the wilderness by showing the author’s growing consciousness of its value. The test of such a book is finally to be found in the growth of the author; the argument of the narrative is that the author’s experience justifies the value of the region, of wilderness itself. In this context, the reader might ask a number of questions. Does the narrator grow? Does she learn to see more perceptively? Does she apply her...