Reading for Liberalism: The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West
Founded in 1868, the Overland Monthly was a San Francisco-based literary magazine that was an immediate sensation on the east coast. For centuries, stories about the American west have been central to how we imagine freedom, the individual, and the possibility for alternate political realities. The Overland Monthly’s stories about the west were no exception.
Reading for Liberalism examines the changing ways in which the Overland’s writers imagined a certain kind of liberal individualism in late-nineteenth-century California. Through case studies of a number of authors who wrote for the magazine, including Noah Brooks, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Jack London, John Muir, and Frank Norris, among others, Reading for Liberalism examines the many ways the Overland group tried to represent the often-hidden stories of American freedom.
University of Nebraska Press, 2013