Back East: How Western Writers Imagine The Eastern United States

FAIN: FT-291317-23

Flannery Burke
St. Louis University (St. Louis, MO 63103-2097)

Writing and editing leading to a book on how writers from the American West represent the eastern U.S. in literature from the mid-twentieth century to the 1980s.

Back East is an intellectual history of twentieth-century writers in the American West who imagined the American East. Scholars typically have examined how easterners imagined the West. They have detailed how images of the heartland farmer, the cowboy, and the outdoorsman had material impact on extractive industries, conservation, and the formation of tourist towns. In Back East, I instead look at how westerners have imagined the East. I center western writers, including Asian American, Latine, Black, and Indigenous authors, whose experiences were never represented honestly or respectfully in the imagined West. In the pages of western print culture, westerners encountered the railroad baron, the dude ranch dude, and the effete intellectual long before they stepped east of the Mississippi River. Like their imagined western counterparts, these figures shaped urban-rural relationships, federal lands policy, and cultural institutions like universities, museums, and libraries.