Maverick autobiographies

the long version

"In contrast to the traditional frontiers and pioneers focus of western studies, Maverick Autobiographies looks at women writers who came not to but from the West. Telling three larger-than-life stories, Cathryn Halverson offers an alternative history of American women's autobiography and a new view of western women's literature. Mary MacLane, Opal Whiteley, and Juanita Harrison, she argues, rewrote frontier myths to make a space for themselves as female iconoclasts from the West. Creating an ardent readership for western women's "naked" desires, they became best-selling celebrity authors. After their intense early fame, though, they virtually disappeared. Halverson examines why, and brings their texts back to light through a weaving of biography, literary analysis, and cultural history - in the process, urging us to reformulate our notions of what it means to be a "western writer." Halverson's discoveries will appeal to scholars and critics of Western American literature and women's studies."--BOOK JACKET.