At Sea on the Range: From Berkeley Radical to Arizona Homesteader, 1934-1948

Winner of The Great Southwest Book Festival for Memoir (2025)

In the midst of the Great Depression, a heart-broken twenty-four-year-old, hoping to gain perspective on America's problems as well as her own, fled to the Arizona desert. There she fell in love with and married a handsome but impoverished rancher. Far from being at “Home on the Range,” this Jewish UC Berkeley graduate was at sea on the range, with no telephone or electricity, struggling to cook black-eyed peas and sowbelly on a wood-burning stove, build a traditional adobe home, brand cattle, and run a dude ranch.

Lost for decades and never before published, this candid memoir by a prize-winning journalist is a thoughtful and humorous story of triumph over adversity. With twenty-two pages of historical photos, it will captivate those interested in:

• The Great Depression
• The American West
• Women’s history
• Jewish Studies
• Eco-friendly practices
• Back-to-the-land stories

Josephine Alexander (1909-1993) was born in Biloxi, Mississippi, raised in New Orleans, and studied English and anthropology at UC Berkeley. During the Depression, she spent fourteen years as an Arizona homesteader and dude rancher, and in 1948, returned to California, where she worked as a prize-winning journalist and photographer to support herself and her two children. Jo's 1981 book, America Through the Eye of My Needle (The Dial Press), received widespread praise for its analysis of business conglomerates' problematic power.
 
Praise for America Through the Eye of My Needle:
"If everyone would read Alexander's clear-eyed lucid appraisal of society's ills and their causes, we might begin to beat pollution, inflation, unemployment, emotional and physical starvation in the midst of riches."—Publisher's Weekly 
A "wise, unpretentious book in which Alexander emerges a kind of late 20th Century Thomas Paine."—San Francisco Chronicle
 
Literary Award for At Sea on the Range:
The Great Southwest Book Festival for Memoir (2025)