Arkansas, Arkansas

Arkansas, Arkansas: Writers and Writings from the Delta to the Ozarks, 1541-1960. Edited by Caldwell Guilds. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1999. Pp. xxii, 605. Acknowledgments, general introduction. $42.00.) Caldwell Guilds and the University of Arkansas Press deserve high compliments for producing so handsome and rich a volume to honor the featured writers of that state. Every loyal Arkansan should possess this thick but well printed and distinguished book. With only a few exceptions, none of the featured writers are customarily included in the southern literary canon. For that reason, the volume is exceedingly timely to redress a longstanding neglect. To be sure, the adjacent state of Mississippi boasts many more literary giants, but the quality of Arkansas prose is much greater than the state's cultural reputation would suggest. Outstanding in the opening pages is Pulitzer Prize-winning Gould Fletcher's historical verses, South Star: Story of Arkansas. Fletcher, one of the better known of the Arkansas writers, captures in metaphor and moving line the tragedy of the Trail of Tears, the Indian removal to the Plains. Yet the poet's proslavery, proConfederate position seems dated and outworn now. Abraham Lincoln, black militia, scalawags and carpetbaggers are demonized in the traditional fashion of southerners belonging to his generation. One must admit, though, that thousands of southern whites still hold these convictions. Fletcher's prose essays reveal his familiarity with the state's history and his intimate knowledge of its geography, climate, soil, rivers, and forests. Excerpts from his work appear throughout the book. No part of the statefrom the richly fertile delta plantation country to the hard-scrabble Ozark Mountains-lacks representation. For the early period of backwoods settlement the selections from the scientist-traveler Henry Schoolcraft and that wonderful eccentric, James Audubon, bring to life the Arkansas wilderness, an image of pristine nature that is not entirely dissipated even in the entries for the modem age. Although the opening section contains much riveting material in the form of travel accounts, memoirs, poems, and tales, the reader may discover an unevenness in their overall appeal. For instance, the opening selection from The De Soto Chronicles describes such distant, unfamiliar historical events and personalities-at least to this reviewer-that the paucity of notes and the slimness of the introduction to Part One must be regretted. Lily Peter's poetry about Hernando De Soto's expedition seems dispensable. On the other hand, Frederich Gerstdcker's story, John Wells in Part Two, retrieves a fascinating study of a frontiersman's strange alienation from himself. Wells, inarticulate and self-absorbed, leaves home for the Texas wilderness for no rational reason, but, like Ulysses, returns years later to circumstances predictably altered

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