Julie Danneberg

Told in a unique first-person narrative, WOMEN WRITERS OF THE WEST profiles five women driven to write and succeed at a time when ambition in women was viewed as a flaw, not an asset. Helen Hunt Jackson wrote hard-hitting, fact-filled reform literature about the ugliness of America's Indian polics, as well as RAMONA, an unforgettable novel on the same subject. Thanks to Jessie Benton Fremont's vivid desriptions, we can still follow her husband's famous expeditions across the unexplored frontier. Louise Clappe's exuberant letters home share the happiness and hardship of life in a remote California mining camp. Accomplished illustrator and writer Mary Hallock Foote helped her audience experience the West through her words and her pictures. Finally, Sioux writer, Gertrude Bonnin's autobiographical stories reveal the sweetness of her childhood in South Dakota and the bitterness of leaving that life for a government school in Indiana.

WOMEN WRITERS OF THE WEST provides a deeper understanding of how each writer was shaped in relationship to the times, geography, and culture in which her writing was produced.