Gods, one of the first works of African American social protest, chronicled the aspirations, disillusionment, and ultimate disintegration of family life for newly freed slaves in the North as well as in the South.
William Eastlake (1917-) Born in Brooklyn, Eastlake worked his way west following World War II. While exploring the rugged Jemez Mountains of New Mex-773- New Mex-, Eastlake developed a strong sense of the Western landscape, which pervades such novels as Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963). During the 1960s Eastlake served as a correspondent in Vietnam and wrote The Bamboo Bed (1969) based on his experiences.
Ralph Ellison (1914-) Born in Oklahoma and named for Ralph Waldo Emerson as testimony to his parents' hope that their son would possess a literary sensibility, Ellison was reared to have both aesthetic and social concerns. At an early age Ellison accompanied his mother when she worked on civil rights projects. By the time of his adolescence Ellison was a skilled cornet player, and he studied music at the Tuskegee Institute. Ellison later moved to New York City where he was befriended by Richard Wright, and, under his tutelage, became active in the Federal Writers' Project. Invisible Man (1952), Shadow and Act (1964), and Going to the Territory (1986) all reflect Ellison's concerns with African American consciousness, aesthetics, and music.
Louise Erdrich (1954-) Born in North Dakota, and an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribe, Erdrich witnessed at an early age both the imperiled condition of the American West and the problematic state of the reservation Native American. Erdrich served briefly as editor of The Circle, a Native American news journal. She now lives in New Hampshire, but her works reflect a continuing interest in Native American culture and the development of the West. Her works include Jacklight (1984), Love Medicine (1984), and The Beet Queen (1986).
Augusta Jane Evans (1835–1909) Evans was born near Columbus, Georgia, and was educated almost entirely at home by her mother. Upon the failure of her father's business, the family moved to Texas and then, in 1949, to Mobile, Alabama. In 1868 she married Lorenzo Madison Wilson, a rich Mobile businessman. Evans's novels — pious, sentimental, and erudite — have -774- been frequently, and at times unfairly, ridiculed. She is chiefly remembered for her phenomenally popular St. Elmo (1866), which sold over a million copies. Her other novels include Inez: A Tale of the Alamo (1855), Beulah (1859), Macaria (1863), Vashti (1869), Infelice (1875), and At the Mercy of Tiberius (1887).
William Faulkner (1897–1962) Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, but moved to Oxford early in his youth. He would maintain a home there for most of his adult life. After serving in the Royal British Air Force during World War I, attending the University of Mississippi, and taking a tour of Europe, Faulkner turned his attention to literature. His early novels brought him critical recognition, but it was the self-consciously provocative Sanctuary (1931) that brought Faulkner fame. In 1950 Faulkner was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Plagued by alcoholism and marital discord, Faulkner continued to be a highly prolific author. He also worked briefly — and unhappily — as a Hollywood screenwriter. Returning to the South, Faulkner taught at the University of Virginia. Acclaimed as one of the greatest of twentiethcentury American writers, Faulkner explores the corrupt and sometimes sinister structure of familial and Southern life in his fiction, as well as the way race and social class operate within that structure. Much of his work details the intrigues and dramas of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County and the antics of the nearly mythical Snopes family. Faulkner's numerous works include The Marble Faun (1924), Soldier's Pay (1926), Sartoris (1929), The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1933), Absalom, Absalom! (1936), The Hamlet (1940), Requiem for a Nun (1951), and The Reivers (1962).
Frederick Faust (1892–1944) Faust was born in Seattle, Washington, and died in Italy while working as a war correspondent for Harper's. His Western novels (Destry Rides Again [1930]; Singing Guns [1938]; Danger Trail [1940]) were written under the pseudonym Max Brand. As Walter C. Butler he wrote crime fiction, and under his own name he published spy novels. -775- Other works of his include a volume of poetry (The Village Street and Other Poems [1922]) and Calling Dr. Kildare (1940).
Fanny Fern (Sara Payson Willis) (1811-72) Willis, best known under her pen name of Fanny Fern, was born in Portland, Maine, but was raised in the Boston area and attended Catharine Beecher's school in Hartford, Connecticut. Her first marriage, to Charles H. Eldredge (1837), appears to have been a happy one, but his death in 1846 left her with two children to support, which she attempted to do first through teaching and needlework, and then through the satirical essays (collected in Fern Leaves from Fanny's Portfolio [1853, 1854]) that eventually brought her fame and fortune as a newspaper columnist. In 1849 she married Samuel P. Farrington, from whom she was divorced three years later; in 1856 she married James Parton. Her first novel, Ruth Hall (1855), contains an unflattering portrait of her brother, Nathaniel Parker Willis; the second (Rose Clark [1856]) features two heroines, one an abandoned wife, the other a divorcée.
Martha Finley (1828–1909) Born in Chillicothe, Ohio, and educated in South Bend, Indiana, and in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Martha Finley (under the pseudonym Martha Farquharson) produced approximately one hundred children's novels, and is chiefly remembered today as the creator of Elsie Dinsmore, a heroine whose life is chronicled in twenty-eight volumes of the Elsie books, 1868–1905. Finley never married, and lived a quiet, domestic existence in Elkton, Maryland, from 1876 until her death at the age of eighty.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) Francis Scott Fitzgerald was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, into a moderately wealthy family. He entered Princeton University in 1913, but left in his senior year and entered the United States Army. In 1920 he married Zelda Sayre, and his first novel, This Side of Paradise (set at Princeton), was published. It caught the restless spirit of the times, and for several years Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were the darlings of -776- the 'Jazz Age' — the name that he gave to the 1920s. During the twenties, his stories appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and Scribner's, and were collected in Flappers and Philosophers (1920), Tales of the Jazz Age (1922), and All the Sad Young Men (1926). Fitzgerald's masterpiece, The Great Gatsby, was published in 1925, but from that point on his life and career became increasingly troubled. Tender Is the Night (1934) reflects the tragedy of Zelda's breakdown, but Fitzgerald also suffered from physical and emotional problems. His experiences as a Hollywood screenwriter were the source materials for The Last Tycoon, which, though unfinished at Fitzgerald's death, was published posthumously in 1941.
Mary Hallock Foote (1847–1938) Born in Milton, New York, Foote was schooled as an artist and illustrator. In 1876 Foote married and moved west with her husband to California. As the wife of a miner and engineer, Foote traveled through much of the Western territory; she became particularly conversant with the terrain of California, Nevada, and Colorado. Her experiences are documented in her own Westerns — novels about the West but constructed from a female sensibility. Her works include The Chosen Valley (1892), The Led-Horse Claim (1895), and Coeur D'Alene (1895).
Richard Ford (1944-) Ford was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and currently lives in New Orleans and in western Montana. Ford's neorealistic novels and stories reflect the rural topology of these regions — as well as the terrain of other Western
