HEART OF THE SOUTHWEST

HEART OF THE A SELECTIVE READING LIST OF GOOD NOVELS AND STORIES EDITOR'S NOTE

In “Who’s Who in America” Lawrence Clark Powell gives his occupation as “librarian and writer,” and since he took his doctorate in literature twenty-five years ago in France, he has pursued a varied career as bookseller, publisher, editor, and lecturer, in addition to serving since 1944 as Librarian of the University of California at Los Angeles and writing numerous books. These works include Robinson Jeffers, the Man and His Work, Philosopher Pickett, Islands of Books, The Alchemy of Books, Land of Fiction, Heart of the Southwest, and Books West Southwest to be published this spring. Dr. Powell’s books and innumerable articles in magazines, as well as a monthly book page in Westways magazine, have established him as one of the Southwest’s foremost literary spokesmen. He is billed to speak to the Phoenix Executives Club in March.

E SOUTHWEST MOSTLY WITH SETTINGS IN ARIZONA AND NEW MEXICO

This bibliography follows one I compiled of novels about Southern California called Land of Fiction. This does not mean that I regarded that region as not a part of the Southwest. It also depends upon irrigation for its fertility, and upon power from the Colorado River to support its industries; and yet two things distinguish it from what I call the Heart of the Southwest-Arizona and New Mexico-namely the City and the Ocean. The vitality which animates fiction about Southern California is generated by the city swarm of Los Angeles, and the weather which makes the region magnetic to millions is Pacific-born.

With few exceptions the books in this new bibliography of novels, stories, and tales are laid in the lands east of the Colorado, south of the Mesa Verde, west of the Pecos, and north of the Border. I was fully aware of the risks in thus delimiting the Southwest, and sought to disarm critics by calling my work "Heart of the Southwest," and subtitling it ". laid mostly in Arizona and New Mexico and adjacent lands." Those last two words are deliberate appeasers of Texans, Utahans, Nevadans, Chihuahuans, and Sonorans, as well as of Baja and Southern Californians, all of whom have marginal if not central claim to be called Southwesterners.

Only a madman or a fool would exclude any part of Arizona or New Mexico from the Southwest, though hot may rage the internecine quarrels as to which parts arethe most characteristically Southwestern-Tucson, Phoenix, or Flagstaff, Roswell, Albuquerque, or Santa Fé. He who flies over the Southwest is certain that no matter where the historian or geographer says it is or is not, one can surely tell the Southwest when he sees it from aloft.

Coloration is one thing-whether it be the dovecolored desert at Tucson and El Paso, the dark cedarcovered mesas up in Coconino County, or the incarnadined Monument Valley. Configuration is another-the deep-carved canyons of the Colorado and the Pecos, and the sharp upthrusts of earth from Baboquivari and the San Francisco Peaks to Mount Taylor and Shiprock, are like no others. The predominance of the arroyo seco is characteristic of the Southwest, and even its two greatest watercourses, the Rios Grande and Colorado, are small flow-ers alongside the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Hudson. Sky determines, Ross Calvin said in his great book on New Mexico's heavenly weather, and the cloud-capped skies of the heartland, of a blue to end blues, are pure Southwest. In using the word selective in my title, I have attempted to choose from many a score more than a hundred of what my own taste and judgment tell me are the best books of fiction. Other choices will be made by other persons. I have eschewed the Germanic tradition in bibliography: to be exhaustive, exhausting, exhausted. As Arizona and New Mexico are the geographical heart of The Southwest, so are these books to me the literary heart of the great body of writing about the region. From the time of Captain Mayne Reid a century ago, through the Beadle Dime Novels of the 1890's, to the modern spate of paper back westerns, there has always been an unstemmed flood of popular books about the West and the Southwest. Worth study is the world-wide influence these books have had, not only in forming people's ideas of the West, but also in actually bringing immigrants to the country. Mostly unimportant as separates, they are meaningful in the mass and deserving of study by someone whose literary taste is less fastidious than mine.

The chief criterion for my choices has been fidelity to the characteristics of this region: coloration and configuration, landscape and weather, the people and their lore. A wide range of fictional skill is found in these authors, but all of them from Andy Adams to Harold Bell Wright, have in common a passionate adoration of the Southwest. Although I am an inhabitant of an adjacent land, I have been in and out and around the region ever since birth, and I regard myself first as a Southwester, and secondly as a Californian.

I have said before and I say again, a good work of fiction is a better guide to a region than a bad work of fact, and these diverse volumes constitute a veritable encyclopedia of the Southwest, its history, geography, and culture, Indian, Spanish, and Anglo.

Need I say that I have not only handled every book on my list, but have read them as well from cover to cover, some for the first time, others such as Zane Grey's after a lapse of years and with nostalgia for the faraway thrill of first discovering the West in books.

In listing them I have not gone into any great bibliographical detail, giving only enough facts of imprint and pagination to ensure identification. Annotations are literary rather than bibliographical, and attempt succinctly to appraise each work's merit, to indicate its locale, and to relate it to its contemporaries and predecessors. To collect a complete set today would not be easy; a few years more and it may prove impossible, so indifferent are people (and most libraries) toward preserving modern novels.

My chief aim is to lead others to the joys of reading which these books have held for me. But as the cookbook says, one must catch his goose before he cooks it; and likewise a book must be in hand before it can be read. To those who would read their way through the Heart of the Southwest, I say visit or write your local library or bookshop. If the former does not have all of the books, they may be borrowed from larger libraries within the state or region. Many of the books are out of print and cannot be found in bookshops featuring new books only. Hunting for them in second-hand bookshops can be great sport and a comparatively inexpensive one. Most of today's avid collectors of Western Americana ignore the fiction of the region, and as a result, the prices of the older volumes of novels and stories remain within the limits of everyman's purse. Many of the titles have been reprinted in paper back books.

I repeat, however, that to acquire a complete set of these volumes, in first editions, is a hard thing to do. I do not have them all, nor does the university library which I head. The most complete collections of Southwest fiction, aside from the Library of Congress which receives copyright examples, are to be found at the University of Arizona Library and the Carnegie Free Library in Tucson, in the State Library and Public Library at Phoenix, the Arizona State College Library at Tempe, the University of New Mexico Library and the Public Library in Albuquerque, and in Los Angeles at the Southwest Museum, the Public Library, the County Library, and the UCLA Library. All of these institutions have lending copies of many of the books, but sometimes when they possess only a single copy of a title, they make it noncirculating, in order that it be kept from wearing out.

And so my final wish to all Southwesterners, wherever this finds them, is for good hunting and good reading through the Heart of the Southwest.

ANDY ADAMS (1859-1935) THE LOG OF A COWBOY; A NARRATIVE OF THE OLD TRAIL DAYS; illustrated by E. Boyd Smith. Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin & Co. [1903] 387 pp. "If all other books on trail driving were destroyed, a reader could still get a just and authentic conception of trail men, trail work, range cattle, cow horses, and the cow country in general from The Log of a Cowboy. It is a novel without a plot, a woman, character development, or sustained dramatic incidents; yet it is the classic of the occupation. It is a simple, straightaway narrative that takes a trail herd from the Rio Grande to the Canadian line, the hands talking as naturally as cows chew cuds, every page illuminated by an easy intimacy with life." J. Frank Dobie. JOHN HOUGHTON ALLEN (1909) SOUTHWEST; illustrated by Paul Laune. Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott Co. [1952] 220 pp. Romantic stories of the Texas-Chihuahua border country, permeated with the acrid flavor of flowers, sweat, and frijoles. Poet,

polo player and translator from the Romance languages, Allen is one of the most sensitive and nostalgic of all the evokers of the Southwest.

CLEVELAND AMORY (1917)

HOME TOWN. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1950] 310 pp. A funny and pointed satire on New York publishing techniques. Hathaway House promotes a first novel by a young reporter in Copper City, Arizona-a transparent disguise for the smelter town of Jerome.

FRANK G. APPLEGATE (1882-1931)

INDIAN STORIES FROM THE PUEBLOS; foreword by Witter Bynner; illustrations from original Pueblo Indian paintings. Philadelphia & London, J. B. Lippincott Co. [1929] 178 pp. "Not only is he a familiar in the Tewa villages around his home town, Santa Fé, but months at a time he has lived in Hopi villages, lived the Hopi life, felt Hopi feelings, studied and revived Hopi art among the native pottery-makers, painted Hopi persons and ceremonies, and listened meantime to such stories as he has caught for us in this volume. He has caught them as patiently, as gently, as surely, as I have seen an Indian pick up in gifted hands a live wood-pecker from a tree-trunk or a live trout from a stream." Witter Bynner.

NATIVE TALES OF NEW MEXICO; introduction by Mary Austin; with illustrations in color by the author. Philadelphia & London. J. B. Lippincott Co. [1932] 263 pp. "The salient characteristic of all of them is that they could not have happened anywhere else, which is the unassailable hallmark of regionalism in literature." Mary Austin.

LAURA ADAMS ARMER (1874)

WATERLESS MOUNTAIN; illustrated by Sydney Armer and Laura Adams Armer. New York, Longmans, Green & Co. [1931] 212 pp. Although written originally for young people this novel of a Navajo boy who is called to be a medicine man will hold readers of all ages for its insight and power. A foreword by Oliver La Farge is a tribute to Mrs. Armer, which concludes, "Many readers will question the high religious ideas, the constant talk of beauty, the mysticism, that she ascribes to Younger Brother and his priestly Uncle; one can only say that, contrary to the general idea, many Indians are so."

DARK CIRCLE OF BRANCHES; illustrated by Sydney Armer. New York, Longmans, Green & Co. [1933] 212 pp. Following the success of Waterless Mountain, Mrs. Armer wrote this moving story of the "Long Walk" in 1862, when the Navajos were herded into the Canyon de Chelly by Kit Carson, then transported into four years of exile before they were assigned to their present reservation in northern Arizona and New Mexico.

ELLIOTT ARNOLD (1912)

BLOOD BROTHER. New York, Duell, Sloan and Pearce. [1947] 558 pp. Based on the friendship between the Chiricahua Apache Cochise and the American scout Tom Jeffords, and how that blood bond brought a lasting peace to Arizona Territory. The book's gallery of real characters is marred somewhat by the introduction of an imaginary love story between Jeffords and an Apache girl. Overly long for some tastes, but the real background of history and landscape and its subtle emphasis on the power of friendship to change the world, make this a distinguished novel of the region.

THE TIME OF THE GRINGO. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1953] 613 pp. This novel of the efforts of Manuel Armijo, last of the Mexican governors, to hold off the inevitable Anglo tide is, like Blood Brother, the product of a vigorous mind immersed in the social and political tides of its time. Laid for the most part around Santa Fé and the Rio Arriba, the book abounds in Hollywoodian situations, but for all that, illustrates the ancient dictum that all tyrants carry within them the elements of their own destruction.

MARY AUSTIN (1868-1934)

ONE-SMOKE STORIES. Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1934] 295 pp. Arizona and New Mexico folk-tales, none longer than the time it takes to smoke a ceremonial corn-husk cigarette.

STARRY ADVENTURE. Boston & New York, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1931] 421 pp. Flashes of poetic description of her beloved upper Rio Grande country light up this talk-heavy novel about modern characters who fail to come alive.

ADOLPH F. BANDELIER (1840-1914)

THE DELIGHT MAKERS. New York, Dodd, Mead & Co. [1890] 490 pp. also with an introduction by Charles F. Lummis [and a foreword by Frederick W. Hodge]. Same publisher, 2ª ed. [1916] 490 pp. This first of a long line of Southwest Indian documentary novels has never been surpassed in its faithfulness to the facts of Pueblo Indian culture and the New Mexican landscape of the Rito de los Frijoles, the region northwest of Santa Fé now the Bandelier National Monument. The contributions to the second edition by Hodge and Lummis are tributes to the pioneer work of him who remains one of the greatest of Southwestern archaeologists and ethnologists. It is illustrated from photographs by Lummis and F. C. Hicks. New editions of The Delight Makers are still being issued by the publisher from the original plates.

WILL C. BARNES (1858-1936)

TALES FROM THE X-BAR HORSE CAMP; THE BLUE ROAN "OUTLAW" AND OTHER STORIES. Chicago, The Breeders' Gazette. [1920] 217 pp. Good stories of ranching, mining, archaeology, Indians and bandits in Arizona, by the author of the standard Arizona Place Names. Eighteen photographic illustrations add to the book's authenticity.

ROBERT AMES BENNET (1870-

BLOOM OF CACTUS; with a frontispiece by Ralph Pallen Coleman. Garden City, Doubleday, Page & Co. [1920] 248 pp. Melodramatic mélange of lost mines, Gila monsters, rattlesnakes, and Apaches in recognizable southern Arizona setting.

ROBERT BRIGHT (1902-

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF LITTLE JO; decorations by the author. Garden City, Doubleday, Doran & Co. [1944] 216 pp. The time is today, the setting a village of northern New Mexico, the people the Mexican-Americans, the story a simple one of family and communal relationships, pitched in low and humorous key. The author's line drawings add to the book's charm.

W. R. BURNETT (1899-

ADOBE WALLS: A NOVEL OF THE LAST APACHE UPRISING. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1953] 279. pp. An old story expertly retold.

DAVID BURNHAM (1907)

WINTER IN THE SUN. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons. [1937] 300 pp. The setting is a guest ranch on the border south of Tucson, and the author manages to convey the superficiality of the "foreigners" in search of health and amusement. Quail-hunting, horse-racing, picnicking to the landmark peak Baboquivari, the condition of desert roads after rain, and cloud formations over the Papago country these hold the interest more than the characters' banal talk.

WALTER NOBLE BURNS (1872-1932)

THE SAGA OF BILLY THE KID. Garden City, Doubleday, Page & Co. [1926] 322 pp. Novelized account of the most notorious of southwestern bad men, the murderous little cowboy-gone-bad named William H. Bonney, born at New York in 1859 and died by Sheriff Pat Garrett's bullet at Fort Sumner, New Mexico in 1881.

TOMBSTONE: AN ILIAD OF THE SOUTHWEST; illustrations by Will James. Garden City, Doubleday, Page & Co. [1927] 388 pp. The Arizona silver boom-town, and its famous six-shooter sheriff Wyatt Earp, are the subjects of this novelized frontier history, based freely on Arizona newspapers of the 1880's.

WILLA CATHER (1875-1947)

DEATH COMES FOR THE ARCHBISHOP. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1927] 303 pp. The statue of Archbishop Lamy in front of the cathedral in Santa Fé inspired this classic evocation of the religious spirit which sought to civilize the primitive Southwest. It is distinguished by economy of language and understatement of emotion-intentions which the author explained in an essay in The Commonweal.

WILL LEVINGTON COMFORT (1878-1932)

APACHE. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co. [1931] 274 pp. Mangus Colorado, the great Mimbreño chieftain, is the hero of this lean and sinewy book, the climax to Comfort's prolific writing career. "It remains for me," said J. Frank Dobie, "the most moving and incisive piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found."

DANE COOLIDGE (1873-1940)

SILVER HAT. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co. [1934] 255 pp. The inevitable satire on Indian Westerns, Medicine Men, Snake Dances, Descents of the Colorado and the rest of frontier lore and love, featuring Lady Grace Benedict, known as Slender Woman, Milton Buckmaster, an old Scout who passes as the Navajo called Silver Hat, and the villain of the piece, a young Hopi chieftain named Harold Chasing Butterflies, who went away to the white man's school and came back with hatred in his heart.

EDWIN CORLE (1906-1956)

MOJAVE; A BOOK OF STORIES. New York, Liveright Publishing Corp. [1934] 272 pp. Good stories gleaned by the author in that "mystic mid country" between the San Bernardinos and the Rio Colorado.

FIG TREE JOHN. New York, Liveright Publishing Corp. [1935] 318 pp. Corle has never surpassed the achievement of this first of his novels, which has a legendary Apache character, in a Salton Sea locale, broken and embittered by the encroaching whites. The book's genesis is told in a foreword by L. C. Powell to a new edition published in 1955 by the Ward Ritchie Press in Los Angeles.

PEOPLE ON THE EARTH. New York, Random House. [1937] 401 pp. A powerful novel of the tragic waste of trying to Americanize the Navajo, which ranks with Fig Tree John as Corle's major achievement and with La Farge's work as the best of the novels about the Navajo.

BURRO ALLEY. New York, Random House. [1938] 279 pp. A picture of Santa Fé as a tourist town, the action centering in the pleasure establishments of the street which gives the book its title. Corle's later novelette In Winter Light (1949) treats similarly of the whites attracted to a Navajo trading post.

KYLE CRICHTON (1896)

THE PROUD PEOPLE, A NOVEL. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons. [1944] 368 pp. An unusual novel of social manners, laid in Albuquerque and environs in 1941, told mainly in conversation, of the problems of the old and young Mexican-Americans in the university and professional upper crust. The author, who also wrote left-wing criticism under the pseudonym Robert Forsythe, sketches the setting with a light, sure touch.

J. FRANK DOBIE (1888)

APACHE GOLD AND YAQUI SILVER; illustrated by Tom Lea. Boston, Little, Brown & Co. [1939] 366 pp. Mostly a narrative of characters and experiences met during trips through the mountains of New Mexico, trailing down the story of Lost Adams Diggings, illuminated by the alchemical magic of Dobie's feeling for places and people of the Southwest.

CORONADO'S CHILDREN; TALES OF LOST MINES AND BURIED TREASURES OF THE SOUTHWEST; illustrated by Ben Carlton Mead. Dallas, The Southwest Press. [1930] 367 pp. Classic work on the subject.

R. L. DUFFUS (1888)

JORNADA. New York, Covici, Friede. [1935] 313 pp. Historical novel about a caravan on the Santa Fé trail in 1846, on the eve of the Mexican War, intrigue over arms, the beauteous Doña Mercedes, and Martin Collins, an ardent Yankee greenhorn. The title refers to the desert crossing in New Mexico.

WILLIAM EASTLAKE

GO IN BEAUTY. New York, Harper & Bros. [1956] 279 pp. A strong, simply written first novel about the powerful influence on Navajos and Whites of the land round about Cuba in northern New Mexico.

LUCILE SELK EDGERTON (1896)

PILLARS OF GOLD. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1941] 403 pp. Romantic documented novel of the lower Rio Colorado in the 1860's, when a gold strike and the struggle between Unionists and Secessionists punctuate the efforts of a San Francisco group to develop a steamship service from the Gulf to the Grand Canyon.

HARVEY FERGUSSON (1890)

FOLLOWERS OF THE SUN, A TRILOGY OF THE SANTA FÉ TRAIL: WOLF SONG, IN THOSE DAYS, THE BLOOD OF THE CONQUERORS. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1936] 756 pp. In an introduction written especially for this volume, Fergusson tells of his birth in Albuquerque, his boyhood and youth as a hunter and trapper, and then of his romantic impulse to recreate the past of his pioneer forebears. "Although they were not conceived or written as a trilogy, the three novels belong together, and I believe they have more interest and significance taken together than any of them has alone. They all deal with the same region and spring from the same impulse. Taken together, they tell the story of a great migration from the time when lone hunters invaded a wilderness until the frontier had been pushed into the ocean and the westward flow of human energy had come nearly to a stop. They also cover a hundred years in the history of the racial and cultural border where the Spanish-America of the South meets the Northern Anglo-America in a contact that is still a vital thing."

WOLF SONG. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1927] 206 pp. "I had occasion last night to look for something in Harvey Fergusson's Wolf Song, which I rate above Guthrie's The Big Sky, as a novel on the mountain men. It is easily among the best half dozen novels on the West, in my estimation. Willa Cather, Conrad Richter, nor anyone else has equalled Fergusson in the swiftness, economy, and prose rhythm of Chapter One in Wolf Song." J. Frank Dobie.

IN THOSE DAYS: AN IMPRESSION OF CHANGE, New York, A. A. Knopf. [1929] 267 pp. Of this novel of the economic development of the Rio Grande Valley in New Mexico, based in part on the career of his grandfather, Fergusson wrote, "By the time I came to write [it] my mood and intention had changed. I was still enamored of a swift and rhythmical style. I wanted intensity rather than bulk. I aspired to a sort of narrative poetry. But it was no longer the heroism of adventure that engrossed me. I wanted now to show the long curve of a human destiny through fifty years of spectacular and unprecedented change . . . Time and Change are the mighty characters in this story."

THE BLOOD OF THE CONQUERORS. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1921] 265 pp. "The Blood of the Conquerors was written first, but it belongs last, not only in chronological sequence but in the progression of the mood. For I was writing, in this book, not of times I had read about and dreamed about, but of times I had lived. The town of the story is the Albuquerque of the early nineteen hundreds in which I was a boy. It is the typical Southwestern town of the end of the frontier period, when all the booms were over and all the battles fought, where the free wealth of the wilderness all had been squandered or hoarded and men had to learn the difficult and cunning technique of taking things away from each other without the aid of firearms."

GRANT OF KINGDOM, A NOVEL. New York, William Morrow. [1950] 311 pp. The fabled Maxwell Land Grant in northern New Mexico is the background for this story of the civilizing effect of baronial life and women on the storied mountain men and their successors. The high country with its snowy peaks and hidden valleys, the great old haciendas with their stately mores, the curious character of a man both savage and tamed, combine realistically herein as perhaps only Fergusson, with his roots deep in New Mexico's soil, can do.

The poetry of Wolf Song has become more rich in texture, the vision of life wiser and more complex.

THE CONQUEST OF DON PEDRO. New York, William Morrow. [1954] 250 pp. The "conquest" is of an old Spanish settlement on the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque, in the years following the Civil War, by Leo Mendes, a Jewish peddler from New York who subsequently by non-violent means becomes a powerful figure in a violent frontier society. Fergusson's treatment of sex is frank and true and tender.

As Grant of Kingdom is a maturer version of Wolf Song, so is Don Pedro a riper treatment of the themes of In Those Days.

ANTONIO de FIERRO BLANCO, Pseud. THE JOURNEY OF THE FLAME. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1933] 295 pp.

This purports to be an account of one year in the life of Señor Don Juan Obrigón (1798-1902) known from his red hair (he was half Irish, his surname a corruption of O'Brien) as Juan Colorado and to the Indians as the Flame, Englished by Walter de Steiguer from Fierro Blanco's original Spanish. Actually written in English by Walter Nordhoff (1858-1937), it is replete with lore of the land and has vitality.

In 1955 a second edition was issued under the author's true name, with a preface about Nordhoff by Scott O'Dell.

O'KANE FOSTER (1898) IN THE NIGHT DID I SING. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons. [1942] 323 pp. A loving and lyrical pastoral novel of the Mexican American Taos Valley village called Sangre de Cristo, full of a deep brooding sympathy for the brown people and a distaste for the restless roadbuilding Anglos, typified by a crew of Texas surveyors.

CLAUD GARNER (1891WETBACK, A NOVEL. New York, Coward-McCann. [1947] 216 pp. An earnest novel of the Texas-Mexico border along the Rio Grande, full of sympathy for the illegal Mexican farm laborers who give the book its title. The hero is a Tarascan Indian peon who triumphs in his determination to become a legal U. S. citizen. Realistic in the beginning and absurdly pollyanna-ish in the end.

FRANCES GILLMOR (1903FRUIT OUT OF ROCK. New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce. [1940] 269 pp. The setting is the cultivated canyon of the Aravaipa east of Tucson where peach growers are threatened by overgrazing goats upstream. The love story is along the same lines of conflict. Miss Gillmor's style is austere and biblical.

WINDSINGER. New York, Minton, Balch and Co. [1930] 218 pp. The author, who teaches literature and folklore at the University of Arizona, is a lifelong student of Navajo ceremonials. The hero of her story is a leader of healing chants who rises and falls in the People's favor, and whose sheepherding wife loves him as a man even when she no longer believes in him as a prophet.

ZANE GREY (1872-1939) THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT; A NOVEL. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1910] 297 pp. Up in Coconino County the lands north of the Grand Canyon are known as the Arizona Strip. Bordering on Utah this beautiful cedar-wooded Mormon country is the setting of this first of Zane Grey's "Big Four," the novels on which he built world-wide fame and fortune. Admittedly the plot is sensational, the characters stereotypes, and the Grey morals either black or white, yet he wrote a story people liked to read, and his feeling for this part of the Southwest was deep and true.

RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE, A NOVEL. Illustrated by Douglas Duer. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1912] 334 pp. Southern Utah is the setting of this probably most popular and best loved of all westerns, and the Mormons are the villains. The character of the deadly yet noble gunman Lassiter approaches the epic folk hero in its powerful simplification-a character personified by the movie actor William S. Hart, slit-eyed, steel-muscled, and claw-fingered on the draw. The final scene when Lassiter, Jane, and Fay escape into the high hidden valley and Lassiter closes the narrow pass by rolling the balancing rock, is perhaps the finest moment in all western fiction.

THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS, A ROMANCE. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1914] 388 pp. The excessively melodramatic plot-eastern society girl, virile cowboy, crooked sheriff, lustful guerilla, wild ride (in a newfangled motorcar) across the border to halt the hero's execution-reads today almost like a satire on this kind of novel. The setting is Southwestern New Mexico into Arizona and Sonora, and although it is accurately observed, Grey's feeling for this landscape lacks the initial passion he felt for the Coconino plateau and the Arizona Strip.

THE RAINBOW TRAIL, A ROMANCE. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1915] 372 pp. For this sequel to Riders of the Purple Sage Grey returned to the Navajo-Mormon country on the Arizona-Utah border, and takes his characters over the Rainbow Bridge and down the Grand Canyon.

TO THE LAST MAN, A NOVEL. Illustrated by Frank Spradling. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1922] 310 pp. This sentimental romance is added to the "Big Four" because of its subject the famous Graham-Tewksbury feud between Arizona cattlemen and sheepmen. As usual Grey's passion for setting-the Tonto Basin-far exceeded his ability to lend his characters the dimensions of real life. His foreword to this novel gives Grey's formula for western fiction: real setting, much violence, plus romantic love interest.

ERNEST HAYCOX (1899-1950) BORDER TRUMPET. Boston, Little, Brown & Co. [1939] 306 pp. Haycox was perhaps the master of the many-writered school of historical westerns, being an accurate researcher, creator of living characters, and a good story-teller. This novel of the Apache war is notable for its picture of U. S. Army life on the Arizona frontier.

CLAUD GARNER (1891-

)

THE SEVEN CITIES OF GOLD. New York, Duell, Sloan & Pearce. [1946] 243 pp. A rousing romance told in glittering style of the Coronado expedition of 1540 to find the Golden Cities of Cibola-the Zuñi pueblos of New Mexico-with an invented love story wedded warmly to the historical background.

PAUL HORGAN (1903) FAR FROM CIBOLA. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1938] 163 pp. Vignettes of ranching folk in central New Mexico during the Depression.

THE HABIT OF EMPIRE. Santa Fé, New Mexico, The Rydal Press. [1938] 114 pp. A narrative of the conquest of New Mexico by Juan de Oñate in 1604, of his death at Ácoma and the subsequent destruction of the Pueblo. Illustrated from lithographs by the new Mexican artist, Peter Hurd of San Patricio. There is a photo-offset reprint, New York, Harper & Brothers [1939].

NO QUARTER GIVEN. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1935] 586 pp. A composer-pianist from the Southwest is the hero of this ample novel, the setting of which, alternating between New Mexico and New York, contains such varieties as a recognizable portrait of Toscanini and a good description of an Indian ceremonial dance at the pueblo of Santo Domingo.

THE RETURN OF THE WEED; lithographs by Peter Hurd. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1936] 97 pp. Seven deserted buildings mostly in southern New Mexico, from a Mission of the 1680's to a modern filling station, stimulate the author to imagine what led to their abandonment. The stories are simple and excellent.

THE SAINTMAKER'S CHRISTMAS EVE. New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy. [1955] 112 pp. A moving story of santos in northern New Mexico a century ago, told with loving insight and clarity, and illustrated from drawings by the author.

THE CENTURIES OF SANTE FÉ. New York, E. P. Dutton & Co. [1956] 363 pp. The spiritual center of the Southwest seen through the eyes of contemporary protagonists under Spanish, Mexican, and American rule, true to history, and told with imaginative emphasis. Chapter headings from the author's drawings are an integral part of this beautiful work.

T. C. HOYT RIMROCK: A STORY OF THE WEST. Boston, The Four Seas Co. [1923] 319 pp. Characters remain wooden in this earnest effort to novelize the details of life on a cattle ranch in northern Arizona near the Utah border.

DOROTHY B. HUGHES (1904-) RIDE THE PINK HORSE. New York, Duell, Sloane & Pearce. [1946] 248 pp. A tough mystery novel, set in Santa Fé at Fiesta time. The pink horse is a part of Tio Vivo, the little merry-go-round which is set up in the old Plaza.

THOMAS A. JANVIER (1849-1913) SANTA FÉ'S PARTNER; BEING SOME MEMORIALS OF EVENTS IN A NEW MEXICAN TRACK-END TOWN. New

York, Harper & Brothers. [1907] 237 pp. Tales of a town on the Rio Grande called Palomitas in territorial times, which are another example of Bret Harte's influence on frontier fiction.

CORNELIA JESSEY (1910)

THE TREASURES OF DARKNESS. New York, Noonday Press. [1953] 310 pp. A psychological study of paternal incest and matricide, all transpiring in retrospect as the heroine returns by train from California via Ash Fork to her girlhood home in Prescott (called Deniza).

CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND (1881)

ARIZONA. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1939] 278 pp. Phoebe Titus is the hard-boiled heroine of this melodramatic story of Tucson in the 1860's, when the forces of commerce and virtue were preparing savage Arizona for statehood.

HENRY HERBERT KNIBBS (1874-1945)

SUNDOWN SLIM; with illustrations by Anton Fischer. Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1915] 356 pp. Christened Washington Hicks, the homely six-foot-four hobocook-cowboy-philosopher preferred to be called Sundown Slim. As a frontier character he anticipates Will Rogers in this good yarn of humor, virtue rewarded, and cattle-sheep strife in a central Arizona setting.

OLIVER LA FARGE (1901)

LAUGHING BOY. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1929] 302 pp. Laughing Boy and Slim Girl may not be typical Navajos, as some critics have complained, but their tragic love story and the northern Arizona setting are fused in a novel of sensitive beauty and powerful impact.

THE ENEMY GODS. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1937] 325 pp. A searching novel of Navajo versus White values in the education of an Indian, written with skill in narrative and sensual feeling for landscape.

ALL THE YOUNG MEN, STORIES. Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1935] 272 pp. Mostly about the impact of the whites on the Navajos and the Jicarilla Apaches.

BEHIND THE MOUNTAINS. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1956] 179 pp. First published in the New Yorker, these sketches are masterful re-creations of the true stories of the New Mexican family of La Farge's wife, Consuelo, set in the village of Rociada, above the Guadalupita Valley.

RUTH LAUGHLIN (1889)

THE WIND LEAVES NO SHADOW. New York, Whittlesey House. [1948] 321 pp. Historical novel of the upper Rio Grande Valley from 1821 to 1852, the heroine a red-headed Spanish-Mexican gambling girl named Tules, who for a time is the mistress of Governor Armijo. An enlarged edition was published in 1951 by the Caxton Printers, Caldwell, Idaho.

JONREED LAURITZEN (1902)

SONG BEFORE SUNRISE. Garden City, Doubleday & Co. [1948] 314 pp. An earthy yet mystical romance of a mountain man and a SpanishNavajo girl in the time of the Santa Fé trade a century ago. The setting of Acoma, Santa Fé, Canyon de Chelly, and the remote tributaries of the Colorado is portrayed with power and beauty.

ARROWS INTO THE SUN. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1943] 311 pp. This sequel to Song Before Sunrise tells the fate of the son of Dennis and Najoni who belongs neither to White nor Navajo, and of the conflict between Mormons and Navajos in the ArizonaUtah country dominated by the Rio Colorado.

THE ROSE AND THE FLAME. Garden City, Doubleday & Co. [1951] 309 pp. A violent romantic story of a brief Spanish journey in New Mexico at the time of the Pueblo Revolt in 1680.

D. H. LAWRENCE (1885-1930)

ST. MAWR, TOGETHER WITH THE PRINCESS. London, Martin Secker. [1925] 238 pp. It was a strange destiny (whose agent was Mabel Dodge Luhan) that brought the great English writer to northern New Mexico in the early 1920's. This novelette and short story contain the essence of Anglo-Indian-Mexican relationships told in economical and powerful language. The American edition (Knopf) of the same year does not include "The Princess."

THE WOMAN WHO RODE AWAY, AND OTHER STORIES. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1928] 307 pp. In the title-story Lawrence uses a wilful American woman, seeking from the Indians the meaning lost from her own life, as a human sacrifice. Although the setting is the mountains of Chihuahua, the sacrificial dances and other ceremonies are those that Lawrence observed in northern New Mexico.

LARS LAWRENCE

MORNING, NOON, AND NIGHT. New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons. [1954] 340 pp.

OUT OF THE DUST. New York, G. P. Putnam's Sons. [1956] 311 pp.

These two novels, plus The Hoax (in preparation) will constitute a trilogy called The Seed, the most powerful Southwestern proletarian fiction since The Grapes of Wrath. The subject is the Gallup coal strike of 1933.

TOM LEA (1907)

THE WONDERFUL COUNTRY, A NOVEL; with drawings by the author. Boston, Little, Brown and Co. [1952] 307 pp. One of the finest of all Southwest novels by a Southwesterner (Lea was born and lives in El Paso) whose power with pencil and paint is perfectly matched by his way with words. The time is mid-19th century, the setting the wind-gritty border country where Texas and New Mexico meet Sonora and Chihuahua, the characters Mexicans, Apaches, U. S. Military, and miscellaneous frontier figures, all alive and convincing-and Martin Brady's black stallion Lágrimas, the finest western horse of them all. Collectors will want the dust-jacket for its drawings by the author.

ALAN LE MAY (1899)

USELESS COWBOY. New York, Farrar & Rinehart. [1943] 247 pp. As Dane Coolidge's Silver Hat satirized Indian novels, so does this absurd and rollicking yarn poke fun at cowboy clichés.

ALFRED HENRY LEWIS (1857-1914)

WOLFVILLE; illustrated by Frederic Remington. New York, F. A. Stokes. [1897] 337 pp. These dialect tales of a camp in the Arizona cattle and mining country owe much to Bret Harte's California stories, both in their sentimental portrayal of western character and in their method of describing the local color of a similar region. This first success was followed by Wolfville Days (1902), Wolfville Nights (1902), and Wolfville Folks (1908).

HANIEL LONG (1888-1956)

INTERLINEAR TO CABEZA de VACA: HIS RELATION OF THE JOURNEY FROM FLORIDA TO THE PACIFIC, 15281536. Santa Fé, Writers' Editions. [1936] 38 pp. One of the most original of Southwestern creative works, combining the essences of history, biography, religion, and drama in a deeply moving imaginative story of a great odyssey. Reprinted several times by the cooperative publishing house founded by the author, the Interlinear was reissued in 1944 by Duell, Sloane and Pearce, New York, under the title The Power Within Us, and in 1946 by Lindsay Drummond of London, also under the new title with a preface by Henry Miller.

MALINCHE (DON MARINA). Santa Fé, Writers' Editions. [1939] 56 pp. A profound story of Cortes' conquest of Mexico, told by the Aztec woman who became his interpreter, companion, and instrument in the downfall of her race. "Neither girl nor soldier could have amounted to anything alone; once united, fitted closely to-gether in their reciprocal abilities, they changed the history of half a world. And even now, long after their return to dust, their reality continues for us who are concerned to know what man and woman become when they work together.

CHARLES F. LUMMIS (1859-1928) THE ENCHANTED BURRO; STORIES OF NEW MEXICO AND SOUTH AMERICA. Chicago, Way and Williams. [1897] 277 PP.

Also, a new edition, with many new stories and illustrations. Chicago, A. C. McClurg & Co. [1912] 353 pp.

"Most of these stories are of episodes in which I had some part. Not all are 'True Stories,' but all are truthful. I hope that makes them no duller than if they had been guessed out of whole cloth and innocence." Thus the author in his preface. First literary discoverer and self-proclaimed christener of "The Southwest," Charlie Lummis has few peers in his zealous championing of the region. The first edition is illustrated from drawings by Charles Abel Corwin after photographs by the author; the enlarged edition has illustrations from the photos themselves.

THE KING OF THE BRONCOS, AND OTHER STORIES OF NEW MEXICO. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons. [1897] 254 pp.

Includes "My Friend Will," an autobiographical account of the author's triumph over paralysis.

A NEW MEXICO DAVID, AND OTHER STORIES AND SKETCHES OF THE SOUTHWEST. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons. [1891] 217 pp.

"These true pictures of the wonderful and almost unknown Southwest are part of the fruits of years of residence and study, and several hundreds of thousands of miles of travel on foot, on horseback, and by rail, through this strange land. They are not the impressions of a random tourist across its bare, brown waste, but are drawn from intimacy with its quaint people, its weird customs, and its dangers." Prefatory note.

The illustrations are from the author's photographs, among the earliest ever made of the Southwest.

CHARLES L. McNICHOLS (1895) CRAZY WEATHER. New York, The Macmillan Co. [1944] 195 pp.

"Crazy Weather" comes to the lower Colorado River country from the Gulf of California each July in the form of oppressive heat, lightning, thunder, wind and rain, and it sends a 14-year-old white youngster called South Boy on a runaway journey up river with a Mojave Indian boy to prove their manhood as warriors. This book is a kind of Huck Finn of the Colorado in the time before the dams tamed the river; it is packed with the lore and legends of the once fierce Mojaves who thought nothing of whipping their Apache neighbors and lesser tribes.

CURTIS MARTIN (1913) THE HILLS OF HOME. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1943] 186 pp.

Sangre de Cristo is the name the author gives to the northern New Mexico town of these tales. It is a volume similar to Steinbeck's early Pastures of Heaven, a kind of prose Spoon River Anthology, in which the landscape, weather, and folklore of this piñon country are simply and lovingly set forth.

DEXTER MASTERS (1908) THE ACCIDENT. New York, Alfred A. Knopf. [1955] 406 pp.

A powerful attempt to dramatize the moral issues of the deadly magic released by the scientists at Los Alamos, in which the laboratory ceremonies on The Hill are related to those more beneficent ones of the river pueblos below.

HONORÉ WILLSIE MORROW (1880-1940) THE ENCHANTED CANYON, A NOVEL OF THE GRAND CANYON AND THE ARIZONA DESERT. New York, Frederick A. Stokes. [1921] 346 pp.

An absurdly romantic story, with just enough feeling for landscape and interest in reclamation to give it a marginal position among Southwest novels.

JOHN LOUW NELSON RHYTHM FOR RAIN. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1937] 272 pp.

A documentary novel, with photographic illustrations and a glossary, of the Hopi Indian ceremonials of northern Arizona.

GUY NUNN (1915) WHITE SHADOWS. New York, Reynal & Hitchcock. [1947] 246 pp.

Sociological story of a Jaliscan peon who becomes an exploited laborer, first on the slag heap of an El Paso smelter, then as a farmhand and roustabout in Indio and Los Angeles, written with insight, sympathy, and gentle indignation.

JACK O'CONNOR (1902) BOOM TOWN, A NOVEL OF THE SOUTHWESTERN SILVER BOOM. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1938] 331 pp.

Globe, Arizona in the latter part of the 19th century is said to be the setting of this best of all novels about mining. O'Connor knows the occupation, the people and the land, and he writes with earthy gusto. He happens also to have written good books about hunting in the West, and this novel has some memorable descriptions of bighorn sheep.

CONQUEST: A NOVEL OF THE OLD SOUTHWEST. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1930] 293 pp.

Jared Pendleton is the tough, Apache-killing hero of this violent novel of the development of Arizona in the 19th century, the action taking place mostly along the routes between Tucson and the Salt River Valley.

RAYMOND OTIS (1900-1938) FIRE IN THE NIGHT. New York, Farrar & Rinehart. [1934] 303 PP.

An unusual novel about the volunteer firemen of Santa Fé, a firebug, and the emotional and social complications of the townspeople, focussed around a big fire on the night of September 6, 1931.

MIGUEL OF THE BRIGHT MOUNTAIN. London, Victor Gollancz. [1936] 320 pp.

Only an English publisher was found for this sensitive story of the growth of Miguel from boyhood through adolescence to young manhood, marriage and entrance into the Penitente cult. The place is northern New Mexico, the people Mexican-Americans in conflict with the Anglos, and the setting of seasonal landscape is beautifully rendered.

GLADYS A. REICHARD (1893-1955) DEZBA, WOMAN OF THE DESERT; with photographs by Lilian J. Reichard and the author. New York, J. J. Augustin. [1939] 161 pp.

A documentary series of fictional episodes about the Navajo, by one of the most distinguished of contemporary ethnologists, with beautiful photographic illustrations.

MAYNE REID (1818-1883) THE WHITE CHIEF, A LEGEND OF NORTHERN MEXICO. In three volumes. London, David Bogue. [1855] 308, 305, 307 pp.

This three-decker is one of the earliest Southwest novels, by the prolific and popular writer who followed in Fenimore Cooper's footsteps. The setting is New Mexico in the time of the Pueblos, and fifty pages of explanatory notes at the end of Volume 3 reveal Captain Reid's efforts accurately to document his stories with the correct facts of geography, zoology, botany, Spanish termsall that constitutes what we call "local color." An enthusiastic estimate of Reid as the first popularizer of the West is found in the book by Charles F. Lummis, Mesa, Cañon and Pueblo.

EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES (1869-1934) THE DESIRE OF THE MOTH; illustrations by H. T. Dunn. New York, Henry Holt & Co. [1916] 149 pp. ONCE IN THE SADDLE & PASÓ POR AQUÍ. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co. [1927] 258 pp.

WEST IS WEST; illustrated by Harvey Dunn. New York, H. K.

Fly Co. [1917] 304 pp. These three volumes seem to me the best of the work of Nebraska-Kansas-New Mexico-California-New York formed Gene Rhodes, the most literary and humanistic cowboy-writer of them all. His books are to the southern Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico what Harvey Fergusson's are to the north-an essential expression of the land and its lore, wind and weather-and though his style tends to be over-literary and his plots were tailored to the Satur-day Evening Post which gave him a living, the man's knowledge was first-hand and his vision noble, all of which is beautifully expounded by J. Frank Dobie in "A Salute to Gene Rhodes" in The Best Novels and Stories of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, edited by Frank V. Dearing. (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1949, 551 pp.) Another valuable posthumous volume, The Little World Waddies, collects other stories and poems, has an end paper map of the Rhodes country, illustrations by Harold Bugbee, and also contains the Dobie tribute (printed by Carl Hertzog of El Paso for William Hutchinson, 1946). Hutchinson's excellent biography of Rhodes, A Bar Cross Man, appeared in 1956.

CONRAD RICHTER (1890). EARLY AMERICANA AND OTHER STORIES. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1936] 322 pp. The plains country west of the Arkansas to Santa Fé is the setting of these stories about Indians, drought, and the coming of the railroad. The author found early newspaper files to be a rich mine, and supplemented this research by talks with old-timers and familiarity with the terrain.

THE SEA OF GRASS. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1937] 149 pp. The setting is a great ranch of grazing land in West Texas, encroached on by nesters, and the story is of the unyielding baronial rancher's inability to hold a high-spirited young wife, all seen through the eyes of the young nephew. Richter's work is the essential distillation of research and observation during long residence in the Southwest.

TACEY CROMWELL. New York, A. A. Knopf. [1942] 208 pp. Again Richter uses the device of a young narrator to tell the story of a frontier madame who leaves Socorro and attempts to become respectable as the wife of a gambler in Bisbee. The look and the life of the southern Arizona copper town are vividly evoked.

WILL H. ROBINSON (1867-1938) THIRSTY EARTH. New York, Julian Messner. [1937] 288 pp. The drama of irrigation and reclamation development in the Salt River Valley in the 1890's. Good description of the Hopi Snake Dance at Walpi, and true to the climate and configuration of the Arizona landscape.

MARAH ELLIS RYAN (1860-1934) THE FLUTE OF THE GODS; illustrated by Edward S. Curtis. New York, F. A. Stokes Co. [1909] 338 pp. The ritual lore of the Indian tribes of northern Arizona and New Mexico is the exotic stuff of this novel, set in the 16th century of the Conquistadores, with posed "arty" photographs for illustration.

V. SACKVILLE-WEST (1892). GRAND CANYON, A NOVEL. Garden City, Doubleday, Doran & Co. [1942] 304 pp. An odd book by the English writer who uses a tourist hotel at the Canyon as center of a satirical conversation piece, with a Nazi invasion tossed in for timeliness.

ROSS SANTEE (1889THE BUBBLING SPRING, New York, Charles Scribner's Sons. [1949] 300 pp. No false romance or glamor about this earthy story of the coming to manhood of a young emigrant to the Southwest in the time of the Apache uprisings, of his work as a cowboy, marriage to a frontier girl, and their homesteading at "the bubbling spring" in New Mexico. Santee's drawings intersperse the story and heighten the reader's feeling that this is really the way it was.

COWBOY. New York, Cosmopolitan. [1928] 257 pp. The setting is southern Arizona and New Mexico, and the story is written and illustrated by one of the all-time best cowboy writer-artists. According to Dobie, nowhere else can be found a better description of drouth or of rain and its greening effect on man and beast as well as on grass.

HARDROCK AND SILVER SAGE. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons. [1951] 224 pp. The lore of mining, trapping, and cowpunching as seen through the eyes of two boys, the sons of an itinerant intellectual miner, in the high country around Globe, Arizona. The author's illustrations are true to his text and the land it describes.

[DOROTHY SCARBOROUGH (1858-1935)] THE WIND: ANONYMOUS. New York, Harper & Brothers. [1925] 337 pp. A morbid story of the madness which overtakes a Virginia woman, married to a rancher on the plains of West Texas, when the persistent wind finally blows away her reason. According to Dobie, the book's realism excited the wrath of Chambers of Commerce and other Texas boosters, much as The Grapes of Wrath aroused the Associated Farmers in California.

JOHN L. SINCLAIR (1902) IN TIME OF HARVEST. New York, The Macmillan Co. [1943] 226 pp. The setting is Torrance County in southeastern New Mexico, the people Okie, Texie, and Arkie immigrant farmers, called nesters, the crop pinto beans. Full of earthy humor and folklore.

DAMA MARGARET SMITH (1892) HOPI GIRL; with a foreword by Ray Lyman Wilbur. Stanford University Press. [1931] 273 pp. Documentary novel of the northern Arizona tribe, pitched to a low and quiet tone.

JOHN STEINBECK (1902) THE GRAPES OF WRATH. New York, The Viking Press. [1939] 619 pp. The high point of Steinbeck's achievement, this powerful novel tells of Oklahoma dust-bowl fugitives to California, where the Joad family typies the plight of the migratory farm workers in the San Joaquin Valley. Included as a Southwest novel because of the epic crossing on U. S. Highway 66.

RAMONA STEWART (1922) DESERT TOWN. New York, William Morrow. [1946] 248 pp. Barstow in California's San Bernardino County, a Santa Fé shop town and ranching center, is said to be the original of "Desert Town." The story is of "protected vice" and gives insight into the workings of the Sheriff's Office.

IDAH MEECHAM STROBRIDGE (1855-1932) THE LOOM OF THE DESERT. Los Angeles, [Artemesia Bind-ery]. [1907] 141 pp.

Dramatic vignettes of desert lore by the author-printer-binder who was the first to "glamorize" the Nevada desert. Illustrations are by Maynard Dixon. This volume and the author's In Miner's Mirage-Land (1904) and The Land of Purple Shadows (1909) represent the beginnings of fine book production in Los Angeles, in which content, format, and illustrations join harmoniously.

RICHARD A. SUMMERS (1906-) DARK MADONNA. Caldwell, Caxton Printers. [1937] 294 PP. Tucson's "Little Mexico" quarter is the setting of this good novel about a Mexican family in the Depression. It reveals the author's deep sympathy and knowledge of Mexican-Indian behavior, their folklore and superstitions, and his true feeling for the weather and landscape of Tucson.

THE DEVIL'S HIGHWAY. New York, Thomas Nelson & Sons. [1937] 299 pp. Based faithfully on the life of Padre Kino, the great Jesuit explorer and missionary of what is now Sonora and Arizona. End paper maps and lithographic illustrations by Nils Hogner increase the book's interest.

ROSEMARY TAYLOR (1899) CHICKEN EVERY SUNDAY: MY LIFE WITH MOTHER'S BOARDERS. Illustrated by Donald McKay. New York, Whittlesey House. [1943] 307 pp.

A lively account of folksy people in a Tucson boarding-house.

RIDIN' THE RAINBOW; FATHER'S LIFE IN TUCSON. Illustrations by Donald McKay. New York, Whittlesey House.

[1944] 271 pp.

A novelized biography of Father, a pioneer character, filled with the folklore of Southern Arizona.

RUTH M. UNDERHILL (1884-) HAWK OVER WHIRLPOOLS. New York, J. J. Augustin. [1940] 255 pp.

Sympathetic novel about the impact of government policies on a Navajo village during the Depression, written by a creative anthropologist.

FRANK WATERS (1902) THE MAN WHO KILLED THE DEER. New York, Farrar and Rinehart. [1942] 311 pp.

The setting for this study of "crime and punishment" is an Indian pueblo in northern New Mexico. Includes vivid details of ceremonials of the peyote cult, told with sympathy from the Indian point of view.

Waters' two earlier novels Below Grass Roots (1937) and The Dust Within the Rock (1940) contain memorable episodes set in the border country of New Mexico and Colorado, but are mostly mining stories of the Cripple Creek Country, marked by a dithyrambic quality reminiscent of Thomas Wolfe's North Carolina novels.

PEOPLE OF THE VALLEY. New York, Farrar & Rinehart.

[1941] 309 pp.

Earthy story of the rise of Maria the goat-girl, who becomes Doña Maria del Valle, the rich witchcrafty ruler of a native community in northern New Mexico, and of her resistance to an Anglo-sponsored government dam, told with sensuous insight into the mysteries of Sex and Death.

JACK WEADOCK (1899) DUST OF THE DESERT, PLAIN TALES OF THE DESERT AND THE BORDER. Illustrated by Jack Van Ryder. New York, D. Appleton-Century Co. [1936] 306 pp.

Simply told folk-tales of Indian and White characters of southern Arizona and New Mexico. A foreword by George H. Doran gives some facts about the author and the illustrator.

PAUL I. WELLMAN (1898)

BRONCO APACHE, A NOVEL. New York, the Macmillan

Co. [1936] 303 pp.

This is the fictional story of Massai, the legendary Apache who escaped from Geronimo's prison train in 1886, and made his way back to the Apacheria, where for several years, before finally disappearing, he waged a ruthless single-handed war against Whites and Mexicans. Based on careful research, as are all of Wellman's books.

JUBAL TROOP. New York, Carrick and Evans. [1939] 583 pp. A full-blooded melodramatic novel which ranges the Texas-New Mexico-Chihuahua border country of bandits and cattle and ends up in oily Oklahoma.

HELEN C. WHITE (1866) DUST ON THE KING'S HIGHWAY. New York, The Macmillan Co. [1947] 468 pp.

Francisco Garces (1738-1781) is the protagonist of this best of all novels about the Spanish missionaries to the Southwest. His heroic series of entradas into the land of the Hopis and Havasupais and beyond to the San Joaquin Valley in California and his final mar tyrdom by the Yumas near the junction of the Gila and the Colo-rado, are told by the Catholic author with both fidelity and im agination.

STEWART EDWARD WHITE (1873-1946) ARIZONA NIGHTS; illustrations by N. C. Wyeth. New York, The McClure Co. [1907] 351 pp.

Good yarns of cattlemen, greenhorns and Indians in southern Arizona. The landscape from Mt. Graham to Yuma is evoked in simple, vivid language. A novelette called "The Rawhide" an ticipates Richter's The Sea of Grass, and has been named by White as the most coherent of all his stories and novels.

OWEN WISTER (1860-1938) RED MEN AND WHITE; illustrated by Frederic Remington.

New York, Harper & Brothers. [1896] 280 pp.

Contains such memorable southern Arizona stories as "Specimen Jones," "La Tinaja Bonita," and "A Pilgrim on the Gila," all of which owe much to Bret Harte. A decade later in the Wyoming novel called The Virginian, Wister fixed the cowboy-hero mould which has been turning out westerns ever since.

HAROLD BELL WRIGHT (1872-1944)

THE MINE WITH THE IRON DOOR, A ROMANCE. New

York, D. Appleton & Co. [1923] 339 pp.

Few American authors have exceeded Wright in sales. Zane Grey ran third to him and Gene Stratton Porter. No American authors have exceeded Wright in sentimentality. I have included this one, laid in the Santa Catalinas near Tucson, to show Wright's sac-charine consistency in sentimentalizing traditional Southwest props: prospectors, badmen, Indians, womanhood, wildlife, and the desert itself, in a way that makes Zane Grey seem cold and hard.