From Booklist
The land of linear horizons, the Great Plains summon imagination from any writer who would set a poem, novel, or essay in them. From the explorers, settlers, and Native Americans who have done so, the editors anchor this anthology with famous scriveners such as James Fenimore Cooper, Willa Cather, and Louise Erdrich, as well as a wealth of authors far less famed. No matter the author's reputation, the vast and capricious land influences every piece here, which Quantic and Hafen arrange in conventional groupings. A straight-up look-of-the-land section opens the volume, exemplified by a passage from William Least Heat-Moon's wonderful, deep-drilling PrairyErth (1991). The experience of the Plains Indians is represented not only by the classic writings of Black Elk but also by powerful recollections of the vanished life by Zitkala-Sa, active in the early 1900s. With a section on literature inspired by the settler experience (e.g., O. E. Rolvaag's novels), this treasury contains more than 100 excerpted selections. Well worth a library's consideration despite its expense. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Description
The Great Plains are as rich and integral a part of American literature as they are of the North American landscape. In this volume the stories, poems, and essays that have described, celebrated, and defined the region evoke the world of the American prairie from the first recorded days of Native history to the realities of life on a present-day reservation, from the arrival of European explorers to the experience of early settlers, from the splendor of the vast and rolling grasslands to the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Several essays look to the future and explore changes that would embolden the people of the Plains to continue to call home this place they have learned to value in spite of its persistent challenges. The infinite variety of the Great Plains landscape and its people unfolds in works by writers as diverse as Willa Cather, Loren Eiseley, Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Langston Hughes, Wes Jackson, Garrison Keillor, William Least Heat-Moon, Kathleen Norris, Wright Morris, Francis Parkman, O. E. Rölvaag, Mari Sandoz, William Stafford, Mark Twain, Douglas Unger, James Welch (Blackfeet), and Canadians Sharon Butala and Sinclair Ross. From tribal histories to the impressions of travelers today, from tales of isolation and nature’s furious storms to accounts of efforts to build communities, from flights of fancy to nuanced observations of the ecology of the grasslands, this comprehensive volume provides a history of the intricate relationships of land and people in the Great Plains. Diane D. Quantic is an associate professor of English and the coordinator of Great Plains studies at Wichita State University. She is the author of The Nature of the Place: A Study of Great Plains Fiction (Nebraska 1995). P. Jane Hafen (Taos Pueblo) is an associate professor of English at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She is the editor of Zitkala-Sa’s Dreams and Thunder: Stories, Poems, and "The Sun Dance Opera" (Nebraska 2001).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Great Plains are as rich and integral a part of American literature as they are of the North American landscape. In this volume the stories, poems, and essays that have described, celebrated, and defined the region evoke the world of the American prairie from the first recorded days of Native history to the realities of life on a present-day reservation, from the arrival of European explorers to the experience of early settlers, from the splendor of the vast and rolling grasslands to the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Several essays look to the future and explore changes that would embolden the people of the plains to continue to call home this place they have learned to value in spite of its persistent challenges. The infinite variety of the Great Plains landscape and its people unfolds in works by writers as diverse as Willa Cather, Loren Eiseley, Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Langston Hughes, Wes Jackson, Garrison Keillor, William Least Heat-Moon, Kathleen Norris, Wright Morris, Francis Parkman, O. E. Rolvaag, Mari Sandoz, William Stafford, Mark Twain, Douglas Unger, James Welch (Blackfeet), and Canadians Sharon Butala and Sinclair Ross. From tribal histories to the impressions of travelers today, from tales of isolation and nature's furious storms to accounts of efforts to build communities, from flights of fancy to nuanced observations of the ecology of the grasslands, this comprehensive volume provides a history of the intricate relationships of land and people in the Great Plains.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal