Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest, with a Few Observations

by J. Frank Dobie

MAGAZINES

The leading literary magazine of the region is the Southwest Review, published quarterly at Southern Methodist University, Dallas. The New Mexico Quarterly, published by the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, the Arizona Quarterly, published by the University of Arizona at Tucson the Colorado Quarterly, published by the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Prairie Schooner, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, are excellent exponents of current writing in the Southwest and West. All these magazines are liberated from provincialism.

HISTORICAL SOCIETIES

Every state in the Southwest has a state historical organization that publishes. The oldest and most productive of these, outside of California, is the Texas State Historical Association, with headquarters at Austin.

HISTORIES

A majority of the state histories of the Southwest have been written with the hope of securing an adoption for school use. It would require a blacksnake whip to make most juve-niles, or adults either, read these productions, as devoid of picturesqueness, life-blood, and intellectual content as so many concrete slabs. No genuinely humanistic history of the Southwest has ever been printed. There are good factual histories—and a history not based on facts can't possibly be good—but the lack of synthesis, of intelligent evaluations, of imagination, of the seeing eye and portraying hand is too evident. The stuff out of which history is woven—diaries, personal narratives, county histories, chronicles of ranches and trails, etc.—has been better done than history itself.

FOLKLORE

Considered scientifically, folklore belongs to science and not to the humanities. When folk and fun are not scienced out of it, it is song and story and in literature is mingled with other ingredients of life and art, as exampled by the folklore in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night's Dream. In "Indian Culture," "Spanish-Mexican Strains," "Backwoods Life and Humor," "Cowboy Songs," "The Bad Man Tradition," "Bears," "Coyotes," "Negro Folk Songs and Tales," and other chapters of this Guide numerous books charged with folklore have been listed.

The most active state society of its kind in America has been the Texas Folklore Society, with headquarters at the University of Texas, Austin. Volume XXIV of its Publications appeared in 1951, and it has published and distributed other books. Its Publications are now distributed by Southern Methodist University Press in Dallas. J. Frank Dobie, with constant help, was editor from 1922 to 1943, when he resigned. Since 1943 Mody C. Boatright has been editor.

In 1947 the New Mexico Folklore Society began publishing yearly the New Mexico Folklore Record. It is printed by the University of New Mexico Press. The University of Arizona, Tucson, has published several folklore bulletins. The California Folklore Society publishes, through the University of California Press, Berkeley, Western Folklore, a quarterly. In co-operation with the Southeastern Folklore Society, the University of Florida, Gainesville, publishes the Southern Folklore Quarterly. Levette J. Davidson of the University of Denver, author of A Guide to American Folklore, University of Denver Press, 1951, directs the Western Folklore Conference. The Journal of American Folklore has published a good deal from the Southwest and Mexico. The Sociedad Folklorica de Mexico publishes its own Anurio. Between 1929 and 1932, B. A. Botkin, editor of A Treasury of Southern Folklore, 1949, and A Treasury of Western Folklore, 1951 (Crown, New York), brought out four volumes entitled Folk-Say, University of Oklahoma Press. OP. The volumes are significant for literary utilizations of folklore and interpretations of folks.