Edward Butscher’s study of Peter Wild is both interesting and disappoint ing. If Winchell’s sense of geography is debatable, his critical eye is strong and lucid as he digs into the crux of Hum phrey’s writing with an explication that is both penetrating and sound. This confusion is intensified by Winchell’s citing numerous critics who link Humphrey’s work with Faulkner’s. The problem here may be Winchell’s confusion of rural with western, and indeed the two have much in common, but few would concede that a book with a rural setting such as, say, Winesburg, Ohiois a western book. where the ‘South draws to a stop’ and the West begins.”This statement is in itself rather problematic most would agree that the West begins somewhere around the 100th meridian, far from Clarksville in east Texas. In the introductory section of his study, Mark Royden Winchell admits that the locus of much of Humphrey’s writing is just “200 miles west of Oxford, Mississippi.
While William Humphrey’s career has fared comparatively better, there is considerable doubt whether he is even a westerner or that his work reflects anything that is inherently western. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ġ82 Western American Literature other hand, what does come through in this study is a keen sense of Estes’s love of writing and his enthusiastic and prolific profiling of rural Texas life.
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