Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1998
Abstract
Caught up in the current cultural ferment involving race, sex, and ethnic identity, people tend to forget. The all-time best-selling novel in the nineteenth-century United States was an antislavery book written by a woman, and in the 1920s black writer W. E. B. Du Bois was widely celebrated by a large number of critics. Periodically over the course of the nation’s history, both as concerns the general culture and our literature specifically, what we today call minorities, and how we perceive them, have exerted huge influences, shaping much of our lives, from what we wear and eat to what we read. Around the turn of the century, Western writer Mary Austin, dressed in what she imagined was the elegant garb of a Paiute princess, sat up in a tree writing delicate stories about desert Indians. More practically, over the decades the makers of ketchup and other condiments have fun-owed their brows at the bounding sales of hot sauce, spurred by the growth and influence of the nation’s Hispanic population.
Recommended Citation
Wild, Peter. Alberto Ríos. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1998. Digital. Western Writers Series, 131.