Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1995
Abstract
Few writers, no matter how popular in their day, can point to “firsts” in their literary careers. As to Theodore Strong Van Dyke, in the midst of the booming land sales of the 1880s, when trainloads of Midwesterners crowded into southern California to be fleeced by ready hucksters, Van Dyke sowed doubts about the direction which was applauded as progress. Particularly through his lightly sardonic novel Millionaires of a Day (1890), this friend of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt initiated an American uneasiness that the hoopla over the region, and over the American West generally, was false, “. . . a fantasy of development gone wrong” (Wyatt 158). More than that, Millionaires is so artfully written it is “the classic” on the subject, the model for other writers following in Van Dyke’s wake (Walker 117).
Recommended Citation
Wild, Peter. Theodore Strong Van Dyke. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1995. Digital. Western Writers Series, 121.