Women Writers of the West Five Chroniclers of the Frontier

In Women Writers of the West, meet five notable women driven to write and succeed at a time when ambition in women was viewed as a flaw, not an asset. Thanks to Jessie Benton Fremont's vivid descriptions (penned in her husband's name) of her husband Lt. John Fremont's historic explorations, a nation was captivated by the rugged American frontier. Louise Clappe's letters home shared the happiness and hardships in a California gold rush mining camp. Mary Hallock Foote brought the West alive in words and pictures. Helen Hunt Jackson described the ugliness of America's Indian policy in both nonfiction and in her unforgettable novel, Ramona. Finally, Sioux writer Gertrude Bonnin's stories revealed the sweetness of her South Dakota childhood and the bitterness of leaving that life for a government school in Indiana. Many of their works -- poems, stories, novels, letters, and essays -- have lasted more than a hundred years and show today's young readers how each woman's writing was shaped by life in the nineteenth-century American West. Book jacket.

Julie Danneberg is the author of the Notable Western Women Series, which includes Women Artists of the West, winner of the Mountains & Plains Booksellers Association Regional Book Award and VOYA's Nonfiction Honor List. She lives in Denver with her husband and their two children