"The Tom-Walker" combines the best of Sandoz's realism with her worst attempts at moralizing. Unable to divine exactly what political configuration right-wing post-World War II sentiments might take, Sandoz nevertheless feared a fascist uprising in this country. Perhaps because these concerns dominated her thoughts at the time, she allowed her…

At the conclusion of Willa Cather's 1913 novel "O Pioneers!", Alexandra Bergson muses about landownership, and more broadly about the human-land relationship, by reflecting on the transience of the county plat map, one of the most popular forms of mapping rural America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These maps were…

While traveling along the Platte River on May 18, 1834, William Marshall Anderson stopped to pick up a human skull bleaching in the prairie sunlight. Anderson was from Louisville, Kentucky, and had been sent west by his physician to accompany a fur-trade caravan to the Rocky Mountains in hopes of regaining lost physical strength. He came west not…

An independent and strong-minded woman gains control of a farm and determines to effect its fruition. Though many doubt her capacity, the female landowner trumps her male counterparts when the farm flourishes under her effective management. In the end, she marries--but on extremely unconventional terms. Rejecting romantic love, she instead weds a…

Rolvaag's story is grounded in the relationship between the undifferentiated environment and the built environment--that is, the structures that anchor people in place and define the parameters of human existence where geographical landmarks are few. This article is a discussion of the ways Rolvaag elicits this process in both the land and the…

In her essay "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde writes, "There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling." Lorde notes that women often…

Literary critics and historians have long attempted to define what is authentic in western literature, praising those works that come closest to presenting a true picture of western life. When read through this lens, Molly Gloss' "The Jump Off Creek" and Nancy E. Turner's "These Is My Words" could be considered praiseworthy.…

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series of novels tells the story of her life through narratives developed around housing; male traditions of buying and building; and female traditions of furnishing, housekeeping, and preservation of culture. Wilder made Great Plains houses a central metaphor of U.S. culture. (KS)