Maverick autobiographies; women writers and the American West, 1900-1940

Reference & Research Book News, August, 2005

PS271

2003-020567

0-299-19720-4

Maverick autobiographies; women writers and the American West, 1900-1940.

Halverson, Cathryn. (Wisconsin studies in autobiography)

U. of Wisconsin Press, [c]2004

230 p.

$45.00

Turning away from the pioneers in covered wagons who populate most studies of western women, Halverson (English, Kobe City College of Foreign Studies) examines three iconoclastic autobiographers who came from, rather than to, the West. Halverson argues that Mary MacLane, Opal Whiteley and Juanita Harrison rewrote frontier myths to make a space for themselves. Halverson uses biography, literary analysis and cultural history to investigate these autobiographies and in the process reformulates the notion of a "western writer."