Northwest Passages

Northwest Passages

The Canoe and the Saddle By Theodore Winthrop Edited By Paul J. Lindholt University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln) 240 pp., $13.95 paper, 2006 Good Pacific Northwest literature peels back the layers of cant that have accumulated over time about this region and gives...
Stealing Dorothy

Stealing Dorothy

‘The Wonderful Wizard of Oz’ and My Fortunate Home by Caleb Stegall If ever an association between a book and state has been stamped on the national consciousness it must be the up-and-down literary-geographical marriage between Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz...
Across the Great Divide

Across the Great Divide

Say It One Time for the Broken Hearted: Country Soul in the American South By Barney Hoskyns. Bloomsbury (London) 256 pp., $17.24 paper, second edition, 1998Quentin Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown begins, to quote the script, with “the rhythms of funky seventies SOUL...
The ‘Time’ of Elizabeth Madox Roberts

The ‘Time’ of Elizabeth Madox Roberts

In 1926 Elizabeth Madox Roberts, a 45-year-old former schoolteacher from Springfield, Kentucky, published her first novel. The Time of Man came out to great acclaim; it was reviewed widely, admired here and abroad by writers such as Ford Madox Ford, Glenway Wescott,...
Robert Traver: Anatomy of a Fisherman

Robert Traver: Anatomy of a Fisherman

The eight nudists arrested near Battle Creek, Michigan, had an advocate in the novelist and fishing writer Robert Traver. His disapproval fell not upon them but upon the police officers involved in the arrests. He called one of them a “deputized window-peeper” and...