Books in The American West series

First Book-of-the-Month Club printing. Originally published in 1928, this extended poem, set during the American Civil War, garnered Benét the Pulitzer Prize in 1929. Includes an introduction by Archibald MacLeish and eleven wood engravings by Barry Moser, which were printed by the Hampshire Typothetae under the eye of the artist. Endpapers are reproductions of manuscript pages from Book Eight of John Brown's Body from the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Printed in Janson type with display type and initials set by hand in Great Primer Antique. Jacket spine faded, slip case faded around open edge. xv, iii , 360, 4 pages. quarter burgundy cloth, red cloth over boards, top edge red, dust jacket, cloth slip case with engraving tipped-in. large 8vo.

A memoir of home, nature, and change in the American West, Light in the Trees makes cultural and environmental topics personal through a narrator’s travels between past and present, rural and urban. Growing up on a mountain foothill in western Washington, Gail Folkins offers a small-town viewpoint of the Pacific Northwest. Sasquatch myths and serial killer realities, a runaway Appaloosa, and turbulent volcanoes beneath serene mountaintops help chronicle a coming of age for both a narrator and a place. Later, a move to the Southwest expands Folkins’s view of the West. From this new perspective paired with frequent journeys to the Northwest, she explores challenges of the natural world, from wildlife habitat and water quality to a changeable climate and wildfires, navigating new versions of home and self along the way.

First published in 1885, The Purple Land was the first novel of William Henry Hudson, author of Green Mansions. The Anglo-Argentine naturalist distinguished himself both as one of the finest craftsmen of prose in English literature and as a thinker on ecological matters far ahead of his time. The Purple Land is the exuberant, often wryly comic, first-person account of a young Englishman's imprudent adventures, set against a background of political strife in nineteenth-century Uruguay. Eloping with an Argentine girl, young Richard Lamb makes an implacable enemy of his teenage bride's father. Leaving her behind, he goes ignorantly forth into the interior of the country to seek his fortune and is eventually imprisoned and persecuted by the vengeful father. His narrative closes as he sets off on still another impetuous quest. This facsimile of the 1904 Three Sirens Press edition includes striking woodcuts by Keith Henderson illustrating the characters in the novel and the fauna of Uruguay. Ilan Stavans's introduction offers an opportunity to revisit The Purple Land as a "road novel" in which an outsider offers reflections on nationality and diasporic identity. The Americas, Stavans, series editor; with a new introduction by Ilan Stavans