Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration - Softcover

California Council For The Humanities

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0930588991 ISBN 13: 9780930588991

Publisher: Heyday Books, 1997

Synopsis

The news of gold in California beckoned people from every continent on earth. This astonishing and instant migration would leave its mark forever on California and, indeed, the entire world. Taking a comprehensive look at the excitement, unrest, exploitation, and romanticism of the California gold rush, this unique and authoritative anthology combines firsthand accounts by the participants themselves and retrospective writings by later authors with dozens of historical photographs, cartoons, and other illustrations.

Long sea voyages, arduous overland trips, life in early, bohemian San Francisco, and the feudalism of late gold rush society - all are vividly described in the words of those who experienced them. The writings of well-known authors like Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Ambrose Bierce, Dame Shirley, Henry David Thoreau, and Jack London blend with less familiar voices - Native Californians, Jews, immigrants from Asia, South America, and Europe, and women. Modern authors such as Bill Barich, Czeslaw Milosz, and Gary Snyder offer contemporary perspectives on the gold rush's environmental, economic, and cultural legacies. Together, these rich writings evoke the spirit and emotions of this legendary era.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Kowalewski is an associate professor of English and American Studies at Carleton College in Minnesota. A native Californian who grew up in Redding, he has been teaching and writing about California for the past decade, both at Carleton and at Princeton University. His essays and reviews have appeared in more than a dozen periodicals. He is the author, among other works, of _Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction_ (1993) and the editor of _Reading the West: New Essays on the Literature of the American West_ (1996).

Reviews

A large, lively gathering of primarily firsthand recollections of the California Gold Rush of 1848, drawn from memoirs and letters, and being published as a companion volume for a PBS documentary airing in January 1998. Massive numbers of would-be miners, the majority blithely ignorant of life in the West, hurried to get to the gold fields. The journey overland to California was hazardous and harsh, as noted in such pieces as the record of a disastrous march across Death Valley by William Manly. Once there, travelers found conditions not much better. Still, life in the gold fields had a vigor and variety nicely caught here. And if very few of the many thousands of miners who made it to California got rich, many, these selections indicate, seem to have had a hard but grand adventure. A final section offers views of the Gold Rush experience as filtered through 19th-century fiction and art (Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Frank Norris, Robert Frost, Czeslaw Milosz), illuminating the continuing resonance of the event that had the most to do with the opening of the American West for settlement--and exploitation. (55 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The California Gold Rush, which began in 1848, was a pivotal event in American history, turning the isolated settlements of California into boom towns overnight. Yet the "popular imagination," as editor Kowalewski notes in his excellent introduction, has consistently ignored its significance (perhaps the heady case of gold rush fever is too coarse for our national mythology to incorporate). Kowalewski has compiled the reminiscences of participants in the rush?one cannot call them "miners" because individuals from all walks of life were drawn to the lure of instant wealth?as well as outside contemporary observers such as Twain, Emerson, and Thoreau. First-person narratives give a good sense of those times, from the wealthiest of prospectors to the poorest Chinese immigrant. Since this is the companion volume to the PBS series The Gold Rush, airing in January and narrated by John Lithgow in honor of the 150th anniversary, it is a worthwhile purchase for both large and smaller public libraries, as well as for academic collections.?Diane G. Premo, Rochester P.L.,
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Heyday Books
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0930588991
• ISBN 13: 9780930588991
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 477
• Editor: Michael Kowalewski