Consider the sagebrush
Towards a simple test for the categorization of Western literature
[A]ll around the battlefield between hilltop and river
larks trill and chirk in the long sweet grass and the
sage,
the holy sage, that purifies.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Places Names” (1981)
You can’t get far in writing about the literature of the American West without wrestling with issues of categorization. What are we even talking about, here?
Perhaps more than any other region on earth, the West is associated with a single literary genre…