The West: A Treasury of Art and Literature - Hardcover

Watkins, T. H.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0883637944 ISBN 13: 9780883637944

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1994

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Splicing essays, memoirs, letters, stories, articles, poems and Native American songs and chants with paintings, drawings and photographs, this magnificent album conjures a sense of the American West as frontier, manifest destiny, site of brutal conquest and visionary realm where Americans seek to redefine themselves. John Wesley Powell's harrowing reconstruction of his historic expedition through the Grand Canyon in 1869, Emma Mitchell New's somber, moving account of life on the Kansas frontier, N. Scott Momaday's exploration of his mystical feeling of connectedness to his Kiowa ancestors are distinctive voices among the eclectic selections, including writings by Mark Twain, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Rudolfo Anaya. Artwork by George Catlin, Thomas Hart Benton, Georgia O'Keeffe, David Hockney, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and others complete a chronicle of exploration, conquest, settlement and development. Contemporary writers Ivan Doig, Pam Houston and Wallace Stegner investigate the West's promise and possibilities. T.H. Watkins (The Great Depression) and writer/photographer Joan Watkins have created a stirring, serendipitous treasury.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

The strength of this eclectic gathering of memoirs, travelogs, stories, essays, photographs, paintings, drawings, songs, and poems is its scope and calculated diversity. In broad strokes a panoramic overview of the American West emerges, culled from snippets of Native American chants; standard writers like Lewis and Clark, Parkman, Twain, Cather, Muir, and Grey; and lesser-known memoirists and historians. The New West is represented by such staples as McMurtry, Stegner, Waters, Abbey, Snyder, Doig, and Houston. Illustrations likewise range from prehistoric evocations to jarringly modern Native American paintings, with a good deal of Catlin, Remington, Russell, Moran, and O'Keeffe in between. A bibliography is unfortunately lacking. This large, handsome book is recommended for larger public and academic collections for its range and variety rather than for blazing new ground.
Russell T. Clement, Brigham Young Univ. Lib., Provo, Ut.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0883637944
• ISBN 13: 9780883637944
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384
• Editor: Watkins Joan