San Antonio College Library

For this edition, noted scholar Gary Scharnhorst has selected 259 letters (including 144 that are new to scholarship) from more than 2,000 Bret Harte letters known to exist. Scharnhorst's lively introduction and comprehensive notes give general readers and specialists immediate access to the literary and social milieus in which Harte lived and worked. A painstaking correspondent, Bret Harte created in his letters fascinating vignettes of life on several...

Literary histories, of course, do not have a reason for being unless there exists the literature itself. This volume, perhaps more than others of its kind, is an expression of appreciation for the talented and dedicated literary artists who ignored the odds, avoided temptations to write for popularity or prestige, and chose to write honestly about the American West, believing that experiences long knowns to be of historical importance are also experiences...

The revised and updated edition of this standard reference work in the field of Western American Literature now contains over 6,000 bibliographic references. The topical listings have been expanded to encompass feminist and environmental studies. Rather than attempting to be exhaustive, the editors have chosen the major interpretive works, making the volume useful to both specialists working outside their area and nonspecialists seeking an overview....

"In Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West, William R. Handley examines literary interpretations of the western American past. Handley argues that although recent scholarship provides a narrative of western history that counters the optimistic story of frontier individualism by focusing on the victims of conquest, twentieth-century American fiction tells a different story of intra-ethnic violence, surrounding marriages and...