Description: This literary history focuses on five women writers--Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Laura Adams Armer, Peggy Pond Church and Alice Marriott--whose work appeared from around 1900 through the 1980s. All came from or lived and worked in California, Arizona, New Mexico or Oklahoma. The book situates them in their time and place and examines their interactions with landscapes, people, art and history. Their interest in fine arts and native arts and crafts is stressed, as well as their concern for the environment.
Brief description: Catharine Savage Brosman, a professor emerita at Tulane University, has published many volumes of French and American literary history and criticism and has written ten collections of poetry and three volumes of essays. She lives in Houston, Texas.
Review Quotes: "succeeds in supplementing, enhancing, and completing our understanding of American letters as literature"-Chronicles; "Neglected and overlooked as a California author, Laura Arner deserves a second life. Brosman gives that to her. The Arizona years, in close conjunction with the Navajo, are spellbinding."-Constance Rowell Mastores, author of A Deep But Dazzling Darkness; "A fresh and finely nuanced interpretation of the response by a group of women writers to the American Southwest. It should be of great interest to anyone concerned with American regional expression."-Donald Pizer, author of Toward A Modernist Style: John Dos Passos; "Brosman explores deftly and sympathetically the fiction of five women who deal compellingly with universal themes."-Allen Frederick Stein, author of After the Vows Were Spoken: Marriage in American Literary Realism.