two north dakota writers - 1982

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North Dakota Quarterly

Volume 50, Number 1

Robert W. Lewis

Jeff Jentz

Sherman Paul

Howard Good

Thomas Matchie

James L. Clayton

Kathryne S. McDorman

John D. Early

Charles Carter

Philip 1. Mitterling

John Carver Edwards

William T. Doherty, Jr.

A. William Johnson

Winter 1982

Contents

5 Introduction

8 A Promise

9 Open(ing) Criticism

18 False Spring

19 Two North Dakota Writers

28 Those Who Gain and Those Who Lose:

Some Budgetary and Economic Conseq-

uences of President Reagan's FY 1983

Defense Budget

37 Tarnished Brass: The Imperial Heroesof John Galsworthy and H. G. Wells

46 The Market on the North Side of Town

54 Notes on Some Cuneiform Texts from

Bogazkoy

62 Buffalo Bill and Carry Nation:

Symbols of an Age

72 Bob Best Considered: An Expatriate's

Long Road to Treason

91 The Interaction of American Business

and American Religion in the 19th andEarly 20th Centuries: A Sampling of

Scholarly and Popular Interpretations

98 'Theses and Dissertations Accepted by the

Graduate School, University of North

Dakota - 1981

106 Editor's Notes



Two North Dakota \'Vriter§

THOMAS MATCHIENorth Dakota State University

In the spring of 1981 two North Dakota native writers received

honorary degrees from North Dakota universities. The University of

North Dakota in Grand Forks honored poet Tom McGrath, and North

Dakota State University in Fargo decorated novelist Louis L'Amour.

Such schools ought to recognize distinguished intellectuals, but the

difference in quality between the two authors makes one wonder

whether higher education in North Dakota is in fact helping the public

to recognize where literary excellence lies and where it does not.

The function of the university, says John Henry Newman, is toraise the intellectual tone of society. It aims at

... cultivating the public mind, at purifying the national taste, at supplying

true principles topopular enthusiasm and fixed aims topopular aspiration,

at giving enlargement and sobriety to ideas of the age... 1

There is no doubt that the public likes Louis L'Amour, for there are

millions of his westerns in print around the world. McGrath, on the

other hand, has only a limited audience-perhaps because he writes

poetry rather than novels, perhaps he is too difficult for the average

reader, or perhaps his socialist philosophy doesn't wash in America."

But this is taste, and whatever the public reads, universities ought to

purify that by calling attention to artistic-intellectual quality.

Contrasting a McGrath work with a L'Amour work as a way of

isolating such quality may be difficult, since the two write in different

genres. But the matter becomes simpler when we realize that both

wrote specifically about North Dakota-its people, history, culture.

Using this state as a focus, I want to place a recent novel ofL' Amour's,

Lonely on the Mountain,3 beside McGrath's long poem, Letter to anImaginary Friend,' and see how they match.

For purposes of contrasting L'Amour and McGrath, I want to

select several kinds of phenomena that appear in both authors' works.

One is violence, particularly fist fights. Another is the use of female

characters, something integral to both, but which, like the acts of

violence, they manage quite differently. The third is Indians, and I

will evaluate their different perspectives on these. That L'Amour's

novel is set in the late 19th Century and McGrath's poem in the first

half of the 20th I do not think detracts from the relevance of these

parallels.

Louis L'Amour's short novel is about three brothers-Tell, Tyrel

and Orrin Sackett- who rendezvous in Dakota Territory sometime in

the 1880's to buy a herd of beef cattle and dri ve it through what is now

North Dakota and Saskatchewan to western Canada. The plot is

simple, but the author provides continual suspense by ending nearly

every chapter with a new "mystery" to be solved or a circumstance to

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be resolved. We have to discover, for instance, whether the three

brothers will meet at all, how and why the cattle are stampeded, andcousin Logan's reason for wanting the meat delivered in the first

place.

L'Amour claims to be a historical realist," but this has to be

qualified. What he does is weave into history such details as the use of

Red River carts used by the metis to haul buffalo hides, Indian lore

surrounding the naming of Devils Lake, and meetings at such

historical spots as Fort Garry and Fort Carlton. But these are

incidental and subordinate to the movement of the Sacketts westward

through the land inhabited by the restless and warlike Sioux.

The violence inL'Amour's novelette takes on various forms, which

are "the stuff' of Western movies and help constitute a code or

stereotype from which he never departed. 6 Tyrel, for instance, shoots a

buffalo while mounted on his dun horse, and Tell is the first to fire his

pistol at a grizzly that "arose from the brush and stood tall in the trail"

(p. 167).But it is Orrin who fights the monstrous Ox-a cowhand hiredfor the trip-in a prolonged and tedious struggle.

Ox is a foil for the Sacketts, for he is a born bully and lacks their

sense of purpose, discipline, and prowess. The Sacketts are suspicious

of Ox from the beginning, and finally he and Orrin lock horns.

The Ox, suddenly confident, was coming in now, ready to destroy him.

Orrin feinted a left, and the Ox, sure of himself, came on in. Orrin feinted a

left, and the Ox blocked it with almost negligent ease but failed to catch the

right that shot up, thumb and fingers spread.

It caught him right under' the Adam's apple, drew back swiftly, and

struck again just a little higher.

The Ox staggered back, gagging, then went to his knees, choking and

struggling for breath.

Orrin backed off a little, then said toGilcrist, "Take care of him." (p. 148)

So ends five pages of fighting. This is the Violent West which

Sonnichsen says is more real to us now than the reality." For some,such a fight might be boring, but this is what people read (and watch

on TV), for it fulfills the myth (Milton calls it a neurosis") of the hero

overpowering one more adversary. Ox, along with the Indians, the

Higginses (Logan's enemies the Sacketts expect to encounter), and the

prairie itself make up the obstacle course-the course of entertainment

in a L'Amour story-through which the Sacketts work out their

destiny.

In Letter to an Imaginary Friend Tom McGrath is also interested

in action, though in a vastly different way from his contemporary.

Written in the first person, the whole poem becomes the act, not just of

the poet, but of a spokesman or "representative," in the manner of a

Greek mask.? Part I, published in 1955, covers McGrath's boyhood in

rural North Dakota, as well as his education in North Dakota-Grand

Forks and Fargo-and in the South. Part II is then a virtual spreading

out of the poet's consciousness to include Los Angeles and New York,thus the whole country.

The long poem falls in the tradition of WaIt Whitman with his

emphasis on cadence rather than on set rhythms or regular line

lengths. Like "Song of Myself," McGrath's poem is meant to be

written over a lifetime, and expands into an epic journey through the

20



story of one's time and place."? The "I" or persona becomes a sort of

.aman, a healer or medicine man who, through a series of

motional responses," transcends his culture in an effort to unify and

la1.11

For this poet, as in L'Amour's novelette, Dakota is the primary

ndscape. Itis not, however, merely a place topass through-though

.epoet leaves it to return in anew way; rather, itis the root and fabric

.his vision.

Never came back; never left...

And now returned in the long cortege of myselvea

Dakota, New York, Europe, Dakota again,

Los Angeles Frisco Dakota New York, Los Angeles

Turning and turning ... (pp. 41, 87)

North Dakota is everywhere," says the poet,12 and in this way the

oy's early life is not separate from his later commentary on America

3 a whole.

Included in this epic journey are many types of violent actions: the

-agic burning of planes on the ground during World War II, for

istance, in which men are scalded to death in their fiery iron cages.

uch moments are not unrelated to the sights and sounds of society at

arge, where the "thump thump thump" (p.154) of the falling body ofa

uicide-as well as the reporter who records it-beats out a rhythm all

)0 common in a world supposedly so free and brave as ours.

These episodes are different from-but related to-those of the Old

if est, for they give insight into our culture, past and present. McGrath

.lsoemploys fist fights, like the one between Orrin and Ox, and a look

'.tthis particular kind of violence illustrates how for this poet real acts

n the past-what Smeall says are deliberate references to "near

hings"13_pass beyond mythic stereotypes and become part of one's

rrowth. On the farm the boy remembers such a fight on the threshing

'ig,where his older friend Cal is beaten for proposing a strike.

My uncle punched him. Iheard the breaking crunch

Of his teeth going and the blood leaped out of his mouth

Over his neck and shirt-I heard their gruntings and arrainings

Like Joveat night or men working hard together

And heard the meaty thumpings, like beating a grain sack

He fell in the blackened stubbleRose

Was smashed in the face

Stumbled up

Fell

Rose

Lay on his side in the harsh long slanting sun

And the blood ran out of his mouth and onto his shoulder

Then I heard the quiet and that I was crying-

They had shut down the engine. (pp. 18·19)

What makes this fight different is that it is perceived by a wide-eyed

boy, and through the graphic images and broken rhythms we withhim are taken up into its "gruntings and straining's." One thinks of

Whitman's "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," where a young

boy-becoming-man first encounters death and the pain ofloss, only in

Letter the boy's new awareness and suffering are related to the

perennial conflict between labor and management.

2 1



It is significant that in McGrath's poem the fight takes place, not

just in rural North Dakota, but close to the earth where men strivehard together threshing the grain. Itis that community disruption by

Cal and his uncle which so affects the boy. Stern sees it as the seed of

McGrath's own radicalism, and says it is in these interactions of the

personal and political that he is poetically most persuasive.» More

than just historical realism, as with L'Amour, this action is rooted in

the meaning of work, of comradeship, of man's struggle for freedom

and identity.

Another way to highlight the gulf between these two writers is

through the way they characterize women. Lonely on the Mountain is

basically about men. The Sackett brothers are tough, confident if not

arrogant, and clannish. The book is about their success on the range

and in the mountains. They are the best shots, take great pleasure in

outsmarting their opponents, and always accomplish what they set

out to do. Again, this is the pattern which L'Amour uses over and over

at the expense of originality; Gurian calls it "cheap myth," a kind ofabsurd self-glorification that makes serious teaching about the West

nearly impossible."

But there are also females in L'Amour's story, Nettie and Mary, on

their way out West. Nettie, the youngest and prettiest, is the most

important. She is trying to find her brother-who turns up on the

wrong side, having sold his soul for a chance to get rich on somebody

else's gold. On the stagecoach she goes to sleep on Orrin's shoulder,

only to wake with a start:

"Oh! Oh, I am sosorry!" She spoke softly soas not to disturb the others.

"I had no idea!"

"Please donot worry about it, ma'am," Orrin said. "My shoulder's never

been put to better purpose."

She tucked away a wisp of hair. Her eyes were brown, and her hair,

which was thick and lovely, was a kind of reddish-brown. He suddenly

decided that was the best shade for hair, quite the most attractive he'd seen.(p.46)

Here is an example of what Hutchinson calls in westerns like

L'Amour's a "sawdust doll," a type of "idealized English maiden"

whose hair is disproportionately important.w However unreal, such

women are common stock in this kind of novel, and we usually see

them through the eyes of men-in this case, the Sacketts-who are, of

course, most courteous and gentle and kind.

Ingeneral, L'Amour's females are innocent, sexless.>? ignorant of

the real West (Nettie thinks Fort Carlton is a town), and serve mostly

as foils for the vulgar and violent world they enter. Though weare told

that both ride herd-Mary, the stout one, was "born a hand" -they are

for the most part adjuncts to the story and have no real identity of

their own.

Because Letter to an Imaginary Friend is autobiographical, aseries of "voices out of the ground, voices of the place,"18 McGrath is

more personal and philosophical about women than is L'Amour in

this single short novel. Dedicated to his wife Eugenia, Letter includes

a host of attitudes toward females. More than a side treat, they belong

to every stage of life:

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First was Inez, her face a looney fiction,

Her bottom like concrete and her wrestling arms;

Fay with breasts as hard as hand grenades(Whose father's shot gm: dozed behind the door),

Barefooted Rose, found tn the bottom lands

(We layed the flax as flat as forty horses

The blue bells showering) ...

My little learning (Gladys and Daisy) bearing

The golden apple of my discontent. (p. 27 )

w far removed these direct details are from the idealized maidens of

Unour, and instead of vague impressions and chivalry, we feel we

lpart of the persona's growing up-a "corpse-bearing tree" as much

"my resurrection bone."

'Most significant to the poet's growth is Jenny, whom he sees as a

[de, a Sacagawea, a mystery, a holy woman to whose true innocence

d laughter he turns from the violent world of men in order to find

nself-a gesture foreign to the Sacketts. And yet even with her it isficult to combine sexuality and spirituality, as we see in this mock

my:

Remembering Jenny ...

My ding-dong darling and haymow madonna ...

Sexual vessel

Lay for us

Bridge of thighscarry us over

Encyclopedic pudenda hairy prairie, automated vagina

Be tuith. us in the day of our hunger (p. 176)

.is modulation from tight descriptive verse to open versification

Iects the poet's OvVTI moods and attitudes toward women with whom

grapples in so many ways. The poem in fact becomes a male-female

conscious-unconscious dialect, where the poet is both aggressor andieptor, "maker" and open to powerful forces from without and

thin.19

For McGrath, love is as much a part of life as hunger, a theme he

rsues in other poems, like his "Letter toMarian,"20 a woman he also

mtions in Letter to an Imaginary Friend:

In the mirror of flesh we confront our own past

(Which is always wrong) our weakness

(therefore: terror, despair)

Our own corruptibility

our human potential for being

Lost.

And that woman is all the mortal hungers

Of our own lost years;

our defeats;

our secret country;

Childhood

future

hope

class

revolution

Our fate. (pp. 179-80)

23



Truly, this poet sees in women a source of humanization that involves

destruction as it does fullness of being. They are as significant as

man's need for food and as relevant as the land itself. Indeed, they are

part of the earth, not strangers in a strange land as in the novels of

L'Amour.

A third point of intersection for these writers is their interest in the

Indian. L'Amour's novel is about a trip through Dakota in the 1880's

when Louis Riel is trying to save the metis (French-Indians) from the

designs of the Canadian government, and when the whole Midwest is

... the land of the Sioux, a fierce, conquering people who had moved

westward from their homeland along the Wisconsin-lVlinnesota border to

conquer all North and South Dakota, much of Montana, Wyoming,

Nebraska, an area larger than the empire of Charlemagne. (p. 45)

The author's use of the metis is interesting; Riel helps the Sacketts

move westward, and this adds a certain authenticity to the plot.

However, by 1880, Crazy Horse is dead, Sitting Bull has surrendered,

and bonanza farms line the Northern Pacific Railroad that has now

passed through Dakota;" thus malting the "land of the Sioux" less

awesome than L'Amour would have us believe. But the Sioux at one

time did dominate the whole territory, and it is in this general sense

that L'Amour employs them-to generate a great fear throughout the

land.

There is no serious attempt in L'Amour to represent the mind or

culture ofthe Indians, as does Mari Sandoz, for instance, in her novel

Cheyenne Autumri.l? Bailey says L'Amour made one attempt at

literature in an early novel but "Literature lost," and he ended up

writing in "nothing but cliches about the old West."23In Lonely on the

Mountain the Indians exist to help define the Sacketts, Tell and Tyrel,

for example, cleverly buy the herd of beef from "friendlies" anxious to

avoid the rapacious Sioux. Tell actually prevents a confrontation with

the Santee Sioux when one ofthem, High-Backed Bull, recognizes this

particular Sackett as the one who outwitted him years ago when

escaping captivity from his tribe.

The broadmindedness of the Sackett brothers also becomes appai..ent

when Tell rebukes Ox for saying "an Injun wasn't worth the powder it

took to kill him." For Te11the Indians are "like everybody else. There's

good an' bad amongst them" (p.25). Tell's leaving buffalo meat for the

Indians is repaid later when he is nursed to consciousness after the

stampede by the "herbs" of an Indian "squaw" (p. 122).The thrust of Lonely on the Mountain is the Sacketts' dangerous

cattledrive through Dakota shortly before it became a state. Indians

provide the suspense through the danger they pose. In this setting the

Sacketts are both brave and tolerant. They oppose violence in the

Sioux as they do in wild animals or white gunmen, and like Natty

Bumppo in Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, they are kind to Indians

as they are to women. They represent what Chase calls "the idealAmerican image-a man who is a killer, but nevertheless has natural

piety."24

Tom McGrath approaches the Indian culture differently. Letter toan Imaginary Friend does more than recognize, like Tell, that there is

goodness in native Americans, or explain a historical circumstance,

24



as does Orrin, when he gives reasons for the Indians' buying whiskey

from white traders. Having grown up near Fort Ransom, McGrathlooks at the Indian and the Indian past as something very close to all

of US.25

He alludes quite often to Crazy Horse26 and Sitting Bull who fought

to preserve the buffalo and the lifestyle of the Sioux-a style he finds

considerably more humanizing than the industrial society that

replaced it. For him, poetry in North Dakota began with the Indian, as

in Sitting Bull's Battle Song:

No chance for me to live, mother

You might as well mourn.

Such poetry he sees as not only the first to appear in Dakota, but verse

that is inherently sacred and still among the best in the region.s?

McGra th looks at Letter as akind of Indian ceremony. He speaks of

the dance, or "kisonvi," performed with the headband, the "kapani,"

as he imagines himself in a far country on a sacred butte. Other poemsof his own he sees as done through a male consciousness; here the

work is a ritual, a dualism between the "I" and the "She" (Fabulous

Dancer) out of which the poet's creativity or "Imagination" emerges.t"

The musical aspect of Letter is again reminiscent of Leaves of

Grass, where there is evidence of music varying from the opera to

wardrums. What McGrath does not share, though, is his predecessor's

faith in the progressive growth of American industry and democracy;

on the contrary, he laments the self-destructive character of

capitalism." Some of this is Marxist theory, but it is also connected to

the Indian, and the 19th century lust for gold-the very thing the

Sacketts insure by their trip west-and for land:

From Indians welearned a toughness and a strength; and we gained

A freedom: by taking theirs: but a real freedom: born

From the wild and open land our grandfathers heroically stole.

But we took a wound at Indian hands: a part of our soul scabbed oyer:

Welearned the pious and patriotic art of extermination

And no uneasy conscience where the man's skin was the wrong

Color;or his vowels shaped wrong; or his haircut; or his country possessed of

Oil; or holding the wrong place on the map-Whatever

The master race wants itwill find good reasons for having. (p. 190)

Though not the best poetry, this is "strong medicine" served with

strong language.

lVlcGrath is more effective when he is the shaman, for like

Whitman he is basically optimistic and a healer, or as Engel points

out, a "humanist rather than an ideologue.t'<? One sees this as the

poem builds toward the final ceremony or "kachina":

The difficult rising.I'll help you.

Slip your foot free of the stone

I'll take you as far as the river.

Sing now.

We'll make the kachina.

(p. 134)

25



Without ignoring the wounds of history-"the past out here was

bloody," says the North Dakotan.w=-his poetry is still hopeful as hebeats out the music of unity with the earth and sky-in fact, the vision

of "the Fifth World of Hopi mytb."32 This is a posture quite different

from L'Amour's Sackett brothers, individual white males driving to be

the best, whose only community is a common superiority.

One cannot deny that Louis L'Amour is a storyteller. And there is a

certain excitement to reading about the Old West where men were

brave, women fish out of water, and Indians a curious primitive force

disappearing in the wake of Manifest Destiny. Western movies have

capitalized on this myth since their inception, even though western

writer-critics like Wallace Stegner say the frontier was always much

more myth than fact.33

One reads L'Amour as one reads most science fictiorr=-to'relax, to

fantasize, to get away from the world. But even the best science fiction

helps us to better understand our society and ourselves, for science

fiction became a literary form, says Scholes, when the connection wasforged between the future and the present. 34Westerns like Walter Van

Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident have tried to make that moral

bridge between the present and our western past.35 In poetry, so has

McGrath; unlike L'Amour, he is no escapist.

Society does not need the university to read Louis L'Amour. Any

book salesman can tell you that. Itdoes need the university, however,

to say to America that this state has a poet of considerable talent and

insight, somebody who sees in North Dakota not just a desolate

prairie or even the breadbasket of the world, but a symbol of renewal

for our whole culture.

It is a culture that is rooted in the past-the gold rush, the land-

grabbing of the 19th century, Wounded Knee-and it can be a key to

our future. America's ills are not remedied through a better or worse

money market, but through a fundamental evaluation of our way of

life. Tom McGrath's vision is a light in that darkness-it is a radicalfaith ironically akin, not to Marx and Lenin, but to Paine and

Jefferson and Emerson and Thoreau36-and that is the prairie fire

that honorary degrees ought to help enkindle.

lJohn Henry Newman, The Idea of the University (Garden City: Doubleday, 1959),p. 191.

2Frederick C.Stern, " 'The Delegate for Poetry': McGrath as Communist Poet," inWhere the

West Begins, Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer, eds, (Sioux Falls: Center for Western

Studies Press, 1978), p. 126, Stern finds the roots of McGrath's communism in early

American history and shows how it is "a vehicle for his art, a framework within which he

can build and render the vision of his life."

3Louis L'Amour, Lonely on the Mountain (New York: Bantam, 1980). The title of this

book is misleading, for most of the action takes place on the prairie.

'Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, Parts I and II (Chicago: Swallow

Press, 1970), Part III is yet to be published.

'C. L, Sonnichsen, From Hopalong to Hud: Thoughts on Western Fiction (College

Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1978), p. 7.

6John R. Milton, The Novel of the American West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska

Press, 1980), p, 35.

26



7Sonnichsen, p. 12.

3John R Milton, "The Novel in the American West," in Western Writing, Gerald S.

Haslam, ed. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), p. 77.9Mark Vinz, "Poetry and Place: An Interview with Thomas Mcflrath," Voyages to the

Inland Seas, 3, John Judson, ed. (La Crosse, Wisconsin: Center for Contemporary Poetry,

1973), p. 46.l"Thomas McGrath, "McGrath on McGrath," Epoch, 22 (1973), 208·9, 215. Like

Whitman, McGrath views his poem as forever incomplete, but he considers it a historical

dialectic-"the appropriation and internalization of the world through action, art, and

language is a social process."

ll"Walt 'Nbitman," in American Li terature: the Makers and the Making, Vol. I, CleanthBrooks, RW.B. Lewis and Robert Penn Warren, eds . (New York: St. Martin' s Press, 1973), p.

936.l2Bernard F. Engel, "Thomas McGrath's Dakota," Miduiestern Misceilanv, 4:3·7. Engel

explains that McGrath is firmly rooted in North Dakota, and sees in it s prai ries and coulees

the possibil ity of renewal for all America.

l3Joseph F. S. Smeall, "Thomas McGrath: A Review Essay," North Dakota Quarterly,40 (Winter 1972) , p. 30.

"Stern, p. 123.

15Jay Gurian, Western American Writing: Tradition and Promise (DeLand, Florida:

Everett/Edwards, 1975), p, 61.l6W. H. Hutchinson, "Virgins, Villains, and Varmints," in The Western, James K.

Folsom, ed. (Englewood Clif fs: Prentice Hall, 1979), p. 34 .

"Paul Bailey, "Louis L'Amour," Dakota Arts Quarterly 5/6 (1978), p. 55. Bailey

satirically comments: "the only beds mentioned [in L'Amour] are at the bottom of rivers,"

and "What rape there is is of the English language."

"Mark Vinz, p. 47.'9McGrath, "McGrath on McGrath," p. 211.

"McGrath, "A Letter to Marian," in To Walk a Crooked Mile (New York: Swallow Press

and William Morrow Co., 1947), pp. 66-7.

"Mary Dodge Woodward, (The Checkered Years, Mary Boynton Cowdrey, ed. (West

Fargo: Cass County Historical Society), pp. 3'~, 76-7. In her diary, wri tten from a bonanza

farm near Fargo in the 1880's, Mrs. Woodward speaks of Louis Riel coming to Fargo to buy

supplies and Sitting Bull passing through Fargo on his way to St. Paul to make cattle

contracts for his reservation.

"Pam Doher, "The Idioms and Figures of Cheyenne Autumn," in Where the West

Begins, Arthur R Huseboe and Will iam Geyer , eds . (Sioux Fall s: Center for Wes tern Studies

Press, 1978) ,pp. 143-51. Doher explains the naturalness of Sandoz' use of li terary devices to

portray the mind and heart of the Cheyenne people.

23Bailey, pp. 54-5.

"Richard Chase, The American 'Novel and Its Tradition (Garden City: Doubleday,

1957), p. 63.

25McGrath, "McGrath on McGrath," p. 217.

26McGrath edi ted and publ ished several editions of a poetry magazine enti tled Crazy

Horse.

"Thomas McGrath, "Conversation and Reading," Cassette tape, pt. l(Fargo, NO:

North Dakota State University Library).

"McGrath, "McGrath on McGrath," p. 212.

'"Charles Humboldt, "A Foreword," in The Gates of Ivory, The Gates of Horn, by

Thomas McGrath (New York: Mainstream Publishers, 1957), p. 10.30Engel, p. 3.

"McGrath, "McGrath on McGrath," p. 217.

"Engel, p. 4.

33Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969), pp.

19-20, 171}.7.

"Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin,Science Fiction (London: Oxford University Press,

1977), pp. I}.7.

35Gurian, pp. 65-6."Engel, p. 4.

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two north dakota writers - 1982

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