The West A treasury of art ad literature
(Book)

Includes index.

A powerful collection of stories, memoirs, songs, poems, paintings, and photographs, The West: A Treasury of Art and Literature provides a panoramic overview and a glorious celebration of the American region that most reflects our hopes, inspires our vision, and stirs our imagination. Amidst the stories of Native Americans, explorers, conquerors, mountain men, cowboys, prospectors, railroad men, settlers, outlaws, and lawmen there is a sense of actions and individuals enlarged to epic proportions by the enormous, diverse, and beautiful landscape in which they appear. We hear a range of powerful voices beginning with the West's first residents, the Native Americans, and continuing with the words of such writers as Lewis and Clark, John Wesley Powell, Elizabeth Custer (wife of General George Custer), Mark Twain, Willa Cather, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Bernard DeVoto, Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, and Larry McMurtry. From early Native American drawings, explorer's maps, magnificent landscapes and action-packed images of rough-and-tumble cowboys and rowdy miners, to poignant portraits of hopeful settlers and pioneers, The West features over 200 images of western life, landscape, and culture. Included here is the art of George Catlin, Frederic Remington, Charles Russell, Thomas Moran, Albert Bierstadt, N.C. Wyeth, Maynard Dixon, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O'Keeffe, David Hockney, and many others. The centuries-old Native American songs and chants, the writings of Elizabeth Custer, Mary Austin, and Barry Lopez offer different, often dissonant, perspectives. Excerpts from John Wesley Powell's Exploration of the Colorado River of the West, The Journal of Lewis and Clark, and Robert Louis Stevenson's Across the Plains celebrate an extraordinary land of riches and adventure. A taste of how newcomers to the region fared can be found in Mark Twain's Roughing It, John Taylor Waldorf's A Kid on the Comstock, and Vicente Perez Rosales's We Were '49ers. You'll meet, too, those who saw the West as a place for new beginnings and struggled to establish a homeland, like the Mormons in Richard Burton's The City of the Saints and the settlers described in Emma Mitchell New's account of life on the Kansas frontier. The terrible loneliness of rural life is brilliantly evoked in Willa Cather's O Pioneers!; the hopes for a new society resonate in Woodie Guthrie's Bound for Glory and John Steinbeck's "Leader of the People." Today, a new image is emerging in the West. The romantic stereotype has given way to a literature woven out of the region's geography, history, and social complexity. Contemporary writers like Pam Houston, Ivan Doig, and Wallace Stegner express what it means to call the West home at the end of the twentieth century. Their voices redefine the richness of the West, finding the magic (in Stegner's words) in its enduring existence as "the native home of hope." Nowhere has the extraordinary power of this region, perhaps the oldest and most visionary place in our national history, been so magnificently documented than in the words and images gathered in this glorious anthology.