| In contrast to the traditional frontiers
and pioneers focus of western studies, Maverick
Autobiographies
looks at women writers who came not to but from the West.
Telling three larger-than-life stories,
Cathryn Halverson offers an alternative history of American women's
autobiography
and a new view of western women's literature. Mary MacLane, Opal
Whiteley,
and Juanita Harrison, she argues, rewrote frontier myths to make a
space
for themselves as female iconoclasts from the West. Creating an ardent
readership for western women's "naked" desires, they became
best-selling
celebrity authors. After their intense early fame, though, they
virtually
disappeared. Halverson examines why, and brings their texts back to
light
through a richly textured weaving of biography, literary analysis, and
cultural history--in the process, urging us to reformulate our notions
of what it means to be a "western writer.".
|
Maverick
Autobiographies
Women Writers and
the American West, 1900-1936
by Cathryn Halverson
The University of
Wisconsin Press, 2004.
Order
a copy.
|
