Waters, Frank - Alexander Blackburn (essay date Spring 1990)
Alexander Blackburn (essay date Spring 1990)
SOURCE: "Pastoral, Myth, and Humanity in People of the Valley," in The South Dakota Review, Vol. 28, No. 1, Spring, 1990, pp. 5-18.
[Blackburn, an American novelist and critic, was the founding editor of Writers' Forum, launched in 1974, and has been especially interested in promoting new talent from the American West. Regarding Waters as one of the world's preeminent living writers, Blackburn has supported Water's nomination for the Nobel Prize for Literature, campaigned to establish a Frank Waters Prize in Literature, and written the book-length study A Sunrise Brighter Still: The Visionary Novels of Frank Waters (1991). In the essay below, he examines mythic and symbolic aspects of The People of the Valley, which he feels raise the novel above the level of a pastoral melodrama.]
The land and people of the remote Mora valley in northern New Mexico formed the...
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