About the Book

Sagebrush School is a term applied to a group of writers who spent their creative years in Nevada from the 1860s to the early twentieth century--its most illustrious representative being Mark Twain. Yet most of their work was never republished from the periodicals in which it first appeared and today remains largely unknown to many scholars and aficionados of Western literature.

Lawrence I. Berkove, acknowledged as the leading authority on this body of literature, has assembled an exceptional collection that rescues the lively works of the Sagebrush School from the dusty archives in which they have languished. The Sagebrush Anthology enlarges Mark Twain's circle to encompass the Sagebrush Bohemians through a compelling blend of humorous and serious fiction, memoir, nonfiction, letters, and poetry. These selections convey the experiences shaped by Nevada's rough-and-tumble culture, abounding in wit and humor--with a fondness for literary hoaxes--that were the last major formative influence on Twain.

The anthology contains sixty-eight selections--seven by Twain--representing outstanding work by accomplished Sagebrushers Dan De Quille, Sam Davis, Joe Goodman, and Rollin Daggett, plus pieces by lesser-known writers such as Arthur McEwen, Alf Doten, and Fred Hart. Berkove's introduction recounts the history of the school and identifies and analyzes its main thematic and stylistic characteristics. He shows that Sagebrush literature records and reflects the collision of the last generation of frontiersmen with the new culture of technology, industry, and big business--men of talent, imagination, and integrity driven to work out distinctive ways of coping with an unresponsive system of justice, an economy tilted toward the rich, and a society that impinged on individual liberties.

Although many critics have noted the influence that this period had on Twain when he lived in Virginia City, few have delineated the influence of specific writers on his style. The Sagebrush Anthology not only shows that some of the ideas and literary techniques credited to Twain can be seen as characteristics of the school that he assimilated and refined, but it also fosters an appreciation of these other writers in their own right, showing that their work encompassed topics and genres that Twain barely addressed. By casting new light on the movement, it invites students and general readers to appreciate a silver flowering of Western literature that remains entertaining and instructive for our own time.
About the Author:

Lawrence I. Berkove, a full professor of English at the University of Michigan-Dearborn (UM-D), retired to emeritus status in 2003 after 39 years of teaching in its humanities department.

He is a prolific and well-known researcher in American literature, and is respected worldwide as an authority on Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, and the Sagebrush School writers of America's West. Many of his essays and books, both editions of important 19th century texts (which he recovered from obscurity) as well as scholarly studies of known works of literature, are now standard works on these topics. Berkove's bibliography comprises over 195 items. Twenty of them are books (ten since retirement), the most recent of which (2016) is an original illustrated story of children's fiction.

In terms of service, Berkove was chair of the humanities department for two years, the founder and director of UM-D's American Studies Program, a member of numerous faculty committees, and president of the local chapter of the AAUP for several terms. Beyond UM-D, he was elected to serve first as vice president then as president of the Michigan College English Association, the Jack London Society, and the Mark Twain Circle of America. In 1981-82, he was invited to Japan as a visiting professor of American literature at Rikkyo University in Tokyo. He was subsequently invited twice to return to Japan to give a series of lectures. In the fall of 1992, UM-D awarded Berkove its Distinguished Research Award; he was also awarded a Distinguished Fulbright Lectureship to South Korea. He returned to give a series of lectures in Korea in a later year, and was also subsequently invited to speak at universities in Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, and, several times, in Israel.

The University of Nevada-Reno houses the new Lawrence I. Berkove Collection in its library special collections room. This collection includes Berkove's archives on the Sagebrush School (probably the most important one in existence), his major archive on Bierce, and his important one on Twain.

The Mark Twain and His Circle Series, edited by Tom Quirk and John Bird