Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1991
Abstract
Wallace Stegner defined one of the dilemmas facing the Western American regional writer when he observed, “The moment we segregate a writer and put the tag ‘Western’ on him we have implicitly downgraded him into some secondary category. If he's a writer we truly admire, we more often than not forget the regional limitation and think of him simply as a contemporary writer” (Stegner and Etulain 137). James D. Houston—a student of Stegner's at Stanford University and a long-time admirer of Stegner's work—has wrestled with this dilemma and has expressed a deep-seated ambivalence about his own identity and place as a Western writer. He has wanted to be known as a California regionalist, and he has accepted and worked within the confines of Western fiction. But he has also thought of himself as a writer who speaks for the American nation, and he has rebelled against the confines of the region. Casting himself as a literary cartographer, he has mapped not only the ways that California reflects the national pattern but also the ways that it offers distinctive variations.
Recommended Citation
Raskin, Jonah. James D. Houston. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1991. Digital. Western Writers Series, 99.