Book Description

"Mary Jessamyn West was born in 1902 to an Indiana Quaker family who moved to the ranch and orchard land of southern California when she was six. As a mature writer, West would return again and again to these simple facts of her youth. Quakerism, the settling of the Midwest as told to her in stories by her mother, and the domestication of the southwestern frontier became the dominant milieus of her fiction, a fiction distinguished by its detailed, authentic conveyance of the homesteading landscape and of the folkways and language of the people that inhabited it." "In Jessamyn West, Revised Edition, Alfred S. Shivers chronicles West's complete works, from her first, well-received story collection about the lives of a midwestern Quaker couple, The Friendly Persuasion (1948), to her last, the posthumously published Collected Stories of Jessamyn West (1986). Eight West books have been published since Shivers's first treatment of the author, Jessamyn West, appeared in 1974; all are discussed in this revised edition." "The author of seven novels, several short-story collections, a volume of poetry, and two memoirs, West kept private notebooks and journals since she was a child. But she began to write seriously only after a debilitating bout with tuberculosis and a long period of recovery and reflection. West contracted tuberculosis at 29, and in its early stages the disease threatened her life. Among the persistent themes in her work is that of understanding and illumination brought about by intimacy with death." "West also wrote frankly about sexuality, a trait the reviewers of her day often found surprising - and sometimes disturbing - in a female, Quaker writer. With great respect for psychological realism and in a polished, often sensuous, style, her fiction explores variously the awakening of sexuality in adolescence, the destructive consequences of self-denial and sexual repression, and the sexual loneliness of middle-aged women." "It is, however, the carefully crafted backdrop against which these themes are played out for which West remains best known and most admired, particularly that of American Quakers from the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. No other writer, Shivers argues, has recorded their way of life as faithfully, humanly, and entertainingly as Jessamyn West." "Ironically, as successful as West was in depicting Quaker ways in her fiction, she wanted neither her life nor her art to be restricted by traditional Quaker concerns for modesty and propriety. West enjoyed shocking people, for instance, by telling them she had once slept with former president Richard Milhous Nixon - a second cousin who, as a baby, had slept on the same bed with West, then a little girl. Struggling against her Quaker upbringing, Shivers writes, West tried to overcome "the tendency to be agreeable or good at the expense of being truthful, to be polite at the expense of being vivid, to be pretty at the expense of being honest." What Jessamyn West wanted least was to be known as "that sweet little old Quaker lady.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved