MARY AUSTIN seems to be settling down as primarily an expositor. Her novels are no longer read, but the simple tales in One-Smoke Stories (her last book, 1934) and in some nonfiction collections, notably Lost Borders and The Flock, do not recede with time.
While the Southwest can hardly claim Willa Cather, of Nebraska, her Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), which is made out of New Mexican life, is not only the best-known novel concerned with the Southwest but one of the finest of America.
Despite the fact that it is not on the literary map, Will Levington Comfort's Apache (1931) remains for me the most moving and incisive piece of writing on Indians of the Southwest that I have found.
If a teller of folk tales and plotless narratives belongs in this chapter, then J. Frank Dobie should be mentioned for the folk tales in Coronado's Children, Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, and Tongues of the Monte, also for some of his animal tales in The Voice of the Coyote, outlaw and maverick narratives in The Longhorns, and "The Pacing White Steed of the Prairies" and other horse stories in The Mustangs.
The characters in Harvey Fergusson's Wolf Song (1927) are the Mountain Men of Kit Carson's time, and the city of their soul is rollicky Taos. It is a lusty, swift song of the pristine earth. Fergusson's The Blood of the Conquerors (1931) tackles the juxtaposition of Spanish-Mexican and Anglo-American elements in New Mexico, of which state he is a native. Grant of Kingdom (1850) is strong in wisdom life, vitality of character, and historical values.
FRED GIPSON'S Hound-Dog Man and The Home Place lack the critical attitude toward life present in great fiction but they are as honest and tonic as creek bottom soil and the people in them are genuine.
FRANK GOODWYN'S The Magic of Limping John (New York, 1944, OP) is a coherence of Mexican characters, folk tales, beliefs, and ways in the ranch country of South Texas. There is something of magic in the telling, but Frank Goodwyn has not achieved objective control over imagination or sufficiently stressed the art of writing.
PAUL HORGAN of New Mexico has in The Return of the Weed (short stories), Far from Cibola, and other fiction coped with modern life in the past-haunted New Mexico.
OLIVER LAFARGE'S Laughing Boy (1929) grew out of the author's ethnological knowledge of the Navajo Indians. He achieves character.
TOM LEA'S The Brave Bulls (1949) has, although it is a sublimation of the Mexican bullfighting world, Death and Fear of Death for its dominant theme. It may be compared in theme with Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage. It is written with the utmost of economy, and is beautiful in its power. The Wonderful Country (1952), a historical novel of the frontier, but emphatically not a "Western," recognizes more complexities of society. Its economy and directness parallel the style of Tom Lea's drawings and paintings, with which both books are illustrated.