BiblioVault - Books by Berkove, Lawrence I.

Lawrence I. Berkove

University of Missouri Press

Sagebrush School is a term applied to a group of writers who spent their creative years in Nevada from the 1860s to the early twentieth century—its most illustrious representative being Mark Twain. Yet most of their work was never republished from the periodicals in which it first appeared and today remains largely unknown to many scholars and aficionados of Western literature.

Lawrence I. Berkove, acknowledged as the leading authority on this body of literature, has assembled an exceptional collection that rescues the lively works of the Sagebrush School from the dusty archives in which they have languished. The Sagebrush Anthology enlarges Mark Twain’s circle to encompass the Sagebrush Bohemians through a compelling blend of humorous and serious fiction, memoir, nonfiction, letters, and poetry. These selections convey the experiences shaped by Nevada’s rough-and-tumble culture, abounding in wit and humor—with a fondness for literary hoaxes—that were the last major formative influence on Twain.

The anthology contains sixty-eight selections—seven by Twain—representing outstanding work by accomplished Sagebrushers Dan De Quille, Sam Davis, Joe Goodman, and Rollin Daggett, plus pieces by lesser-known writers such as Arthur McEwen, Alf Doten, and Fred Hart. Berkove’s introduction recounts the history of the school and identifies and analyzes its main thematic and stylistic characteristics. He shows that Sagebrush literature records and reflects the collision of the last generation of frontiersmen with the new culture of technology, industry, and big business—men of talent, imagination, and integrity driven to work out distinctive ways of coping with an unresponsive system of justice, an economy tilted toward the rich, and a society that impinged on individual liberties.

Although many critics have noted the influence that this period had on Twain when he lived in Virginia City, few have delineated the influence of specific writers on his style. The Sagebrush Anthology not only shows that some of the ideas and literary techniques credited to Twain can be seen as characteristics of the school that he assimilated and refined, but it also fosters an appreciation of these other writers in their own right, showing that their work encompassed topics and genres that Twain barely addressed. By casting new light on the movement, it invites students and general readers to appreciate a silver flowering of Western literature that remains entertaining and instructive for our own time.

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Donnelyn Curtis

University of Missouri Press

The discovery and mining of the Comstock Lode in Nevada forever changed the mining culture of the American West. Using the pen name Dan De Quille, in 1876 William Wright published The Big Bonanza, the best-known contemporary account of the Comstock Lode mines. Previously, however, in nearly fifty newspaper accounts from 1860 to 1863, De Quille had documented the development of the early Comstock with a frankness, abundance of detail, sense of immediacy, and excitement largely absent from his book. Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove have gathered those accounts together in Before The Big Bonanza.

De Quille describes the amazing transformation of the Comstock in less than four years from miscellaneous tent camps and primitive mining sites to an incredible complex of underground shafts and tunnels beneath a group of wealth-producing cities, with modern buildings, state-of-the-art mills, orderly streets, and traffic jams. He captures the vitality of the inhabitants' resolution and resourcefulness as they survive destructive storms and being cut off from supplies and entertainment, and he chronicles the events that kept Nevada and California in the Union. While reporting the prevailing violence of brawling and dueling and anti-Indian prejudice, De Quille at the same time conveys his thoughtful observations on the significance to democracy and civilization of the existence of such license.

This trove of columns, collected from a variety of newspapers, is history in the making and additionally casts new light on the life and rapidly developing art of De Quille, the biographer of the Comstock and one of the most versatile and accomplished authors of the Old West.

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Fighting Horse Of Stanislaus

Stories Essays Dan De Quille

LAWRENCE I. BERKOVE

University of Iowa Press, 1990

Tongue-Oil Timothy, as unflappable as he is unconscionable, swindles Wasatch Sam in a villainous poker game. Amazed prospectors discover a full-grown silver man deep in a mountain tunnel. Old Pizen, a horse so mean that he was almost poison to himself, is wagered by his own owner in the fight of his life. The travelling stones of Pahranagat, when scattered about the ground, immediately huddle together like eggs in a nest. Highly eccentric but shrewd, itinerant preacher Lorenzo Dow raises the devil. A cheery voiced goblin frog points the way toward the great Comstack silver lode. These tongue-in-cheek creations join Bendix Biargo, the Seven Nimrods of the Sierras, a Female World-Ranger, and Dan De Quille's other unforgettable characters to make the pioneers and Comstockers come alive once more.

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Heretical Fictions

Religion in the Literature of Mark Twain

LAWRENCE I. BERKOVE

University of Iowa Press, 2010

Challenging the prevailing belief that Mark Twain’s position on religion hovered somewhere between skepticism and outright heresy, Lawrence Berkove and Joseph Csicsila marshal biographical details of Twain’s life alongside close readings of his work to explore the religious faith of America’s most beloved writer and humorist. They conclude not only that religion was an important factor in Twain’s life but also that the popular conception of Twain as agnostic, atheist, or apostate is simply wrong.

Heretical Fictions is the first full-length study to assess the importance of Twain’s heretical Calvinism as the foundation of his major works, bringing to light important thematic ties that connect the author’s early work to his high period and from there to his late work. Berkove and Csicsila set forth the main elements of Twain’s “countertheological” interpretation of Calvinism and analyze in detail the way it shapes five of his major books—Roughing It, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger—as well as some of his major short stories. The result is a ground-breaking and unconventional portrait of a seminal figure in American letters.

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