Reviews Fifty Western Writers: A Bio-Bibliographical Sourcebook. Edited by Fred Erisman and Richard W. Etulain. (Westport, GT: Greenwood Press, 1982. 562 pages, $45.00.) Fifty Western Writers is a repository of information for researchers, instructors, and students. Each article is the work of a specialist. Each follows the same format — biography, major themes, survey of criticism, and bibliog raphy of primary and secondary works. The arrangement is alphabetical: Abbey, Adams, Austin, Brand, Capps, Cather, Clark, Davis, DeVoto, Eastlake, Fergusson, Fisher, Foote, Garland, Graves, Grey, Guthrie, Harte, Haycox, Horgan, Hough, Jeffers, Johnson, Kelton, Kesey, L’Amour, London, McMurtry , Manfred, Miller, Momaday, Morris, Neihardt, Norris, Remington, Rhodes, Richter, Roethke, Rolvaag, Sandoz, Schaefer, Short, Snyder, Stafford, Stegner, Steinbeck, Stewart, Suckow, Waters, and Wister. This limited source book, the editors note, reflects the variety of the West and the variety of its fiction, nonfiction, and poetry — nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, eastern- and western-born, majority and minority voices, different attitudes toward the West, and depictions of primitive to contemporary times. Modeled on such useful specialized guides as Floyd Stovall’sEight Ameri can Authors and Jackson Byer’s Fifteen Modern American Authors, the Erisman-Etulain assemblage is intended for beginning and veteran students of the West. It isnot a canon, but ismeant to serve as an adjunct to other regional guides and bibliographies and, it goes without saying, to such comprehensive source-books as The Dictionary of Literary Biography. Although biography has no especially critical importance, most western critics assume that life, region, and letters interpenetrate in important ways. The Major Themes section is meant to disclose a writer’s key ideas — “their nature, their origin, and their most significant expressions.” The Survey of Criticism section is designed to spotlight documents which best explain a writer’s work and his location in western American literary history. The selective Bibliography provides full publication data. Convenience, of course, justifies the mixed information. The book’sheft, print, arrangement, uniform pattern, and index invite dipping into. Probably any other two collaborators in the field would include in their hypothetical “Fifty Western Writers” most of the Erisman-Etulain choices. Only a smattering are moot. The inclusion of Frederic Remington as a writer, for example, seems to rest chiefly on his fame as an illustrator. Certainly a few brows will lift at the embracing of formula writers like Max Brand, Zane Grey, Ernest Haycox, Emerson Hough, Louis I/Amour, and Luke Short — at the 156 Western American Literature expense of, say, Gertrude Atherton, Samuel Clemens, E. W. Howe, Helen Hunt Jackson, Sinclair Lewis, and William Saroyan. Though the editors expli citly decline to judge the relative merits of the Popular Western and the Novel of the W'est, their egalitarian format tacitly upgrades the high muckamucks of horse opera — many a regional writer’salbatross. With few exceptions, the entries in this big critical collection are wellwritten . The prose is lucid, the ideas reasonable, the facts vital. For good or ill, the essays typically carry signs of the contributor’searlier expositions on the same writer. The best biographical sketches, of course, shape the writer’s life, offer an impression of inner development. The less successful pile up external fact: few readers need to know, for example, that Mary Austin’s ex-husband late in life “was a retired sales agent for the American Potash Company in Los Angeles.” The Major Themes category tends to split content and form, but the finest discussions view ideas both within and without aesthetic wholes. Interpretations of “theme” range all the way from the ingenuous (“The theme of violence is commonplace in the popular Western, and L’Amour’s work is no exception”) to the reticular (“The first theme, tripartite and remarkably inclusive albeit unified as Indian belief, Momaday expresses both symbolically and explicitly”). In western literature, the locus of critical attention shifts too easily from letters to landscape. Literary criticism isnever at its best when it chiefly judges literature on such nonliterary criteria as racism, sexism, or ecology. Since most contributors naturally champion their subjects, negative assessment sometimes appears only in the Survey of Criticism sections. These surveys are instructive, and the self-conscious objectivity of a contributor’scomments on his own work sometimes...
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Jan 11, 1997
Johan Strijdom 
