Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1978
Abstract
In his first two novels of the early Oregon country, Trask and Moontrap, Northwestern author Don Berry placed himself within what has come to be perhaps the essential tradition in serious Western American literature. Like such earlier writers as Willa Gather, Robinson Jeffers, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark, and like his contemporary fellow-Northwesterner Gary Snyder, Don Berry conveys to us a sacramental belief that transcendent power or energy awaits man’s explorations within the natural world. Further, Berry’s work asserts that this participation, this ultimate reconciliation with the patterns of earth and sky, water and rock, must be undertaken in defiance of the conventional social order if one would reach his full potentiality for human freedom and awareness. That meaning is conveyed to us in the central figures of Trask and Webb in Berry’s first novels, and in a somewhat different form through the spiritual discoveries of Ben Thaler, the first-person narrator of Berry’s third novel, To Build a Ship.
Recommended Citation
Love, Glen A. Don Berry. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1978. Digital. Western Writers Series, 35.