Document Type
Book
Publication Date
2005
Abstract
By 1930, James Stevens had gained a national reputation as one of the Northwest’s most promising and outspoken young writers. Seventy-five years later, he has slipped so far into obscurity that relatively few people know of his contributions not only to Northwest writing but also to American literature in general and to the literature of the American West in particular. His tall tales made Paul Bunyan one of the great heroes of American popular culture. The controversial literary manifesto he co-authored with Oregon author H. L. Davis led to a new era in the history of the Northwest’s literature. And Stevens’s short stories and novels celebrated the spirit and achievements of workingmen such as loggers, teamsters, and miners whose lives he saw as being almost as heroic as the lives of Homer’s ancient Greek warriors. In his best novel, Big Jim Turner (1948), Stevens created a would-be modern-day Homer who tells about the creative force unleashed by living and working in the Northwest and by reading in its public libraries.
Recommended Citation
Maguire, James H. James Stevens. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 2005. Digital. Western Writers Series, 165.