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Katherine Anne Porter's Virgin Land

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The southwestern story reflects the larger western one—the powerful narrative of being drawn to a dream of paradise. The cowboy, dominant icon of the frontier myth, is primarily a Texas and southwestern figure. After the Civil War, when enterprising Texas veterans discovered their homes destroyed and herds of cattle roaming wild, they rounded up the cattle, beginning the trail drives of cowboy legend that lasted from about 1870 to 1895, when barbed wire, railroads, and economic declines ended trail driving. Still, the cowboy is internationally identifiable as an American symbol—an image of frontier freedom and independence.
In Virgin Land, Henry Nash Smith traced cowboy narrative’s popularity in late nineteenth-century dime novels, reinforced …show more content…
Katherine Anne Porter obscured her past, shaving four years off her age and claiming to have been brought up among a southern, “white pillared” crowd. Porter’s southwestern past was unhappy, and she got out of Texas “like a bat out of hell” as soon as she could. But her strong, ambivalent women, like Miss Sophia Jane Rhea of The Old Order (1955) come from that past, and “The Grave” and “Noon Wine” portray the region’s strengths (ingenuity, democracy, strong- mindedness) and weaknesses (sexism, racism, anti-intellectualism). Notable southwestern African American and Hispanic writers during this period include Texas-born Sutton E. Griggs whose Imperium in Imperio (1899) and Unfettered (1902) foreshadowed later works calling for full rights for black citizens. Dobie also encouraged Mexican American writers, especially Jovita González who served as president of the Texas Folklore Society from 1931 to 1932. Arguably the most important southwestern writer of color during this period was Ralph Ellison. His early stories and posthumous novel, Three Days Before the Shooting…(2010), are often set in Oklahoma, while his major work, Invisible Man (1952), is set mainly in Harlem, but it concerns the themes of freedom and restriction raised by Ellison’s southwestern

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