num_pages: 171
description: Mary Jessamyn West was born in 1902 to an Indiana Quaker family who moved to the ranch and orchard land of southern California when she was six. As a mature writer, West would return again and again to these simple facts of her youth. Quakerism, the settling of the Midwest as told to her in stories by her mother, and the domestication of the southwestern frontier became the dominant milieus of her fiction, a fiction distinguished by its detailed, authentic conveyance of the homesteading landscape and of the folkways and language of the people that inhabited it. In Jessamyn West, Revised Edition, Alfred S. Shivers chronicles West's complete works, from her first, well-received story collection about the lives of a midwestern Quaker couple, The Friendly Persuasion (1948), to her last, the posthumously published Collected Stories of Jessamyn West (1986). Eight West books have been published since Shivers's first treatment of the author, Jessamyn West, appeared in 1974; all are discussed in this revised edition. The author of seven novels, several short-story collections, a volume of poetry, and two memoirs, West kept private notebooks and journals since she was a child. But she began to write seriously only after a debilitating bout with tuberculosis and a long period of recovery and reflection. West contracted tuberculosis at 29, and in its early stages the disease threatened her life. Among the persistent themes in her work is that of understanding and illumination brought about by intimacy with death. West also wrote frankly about sexuality, a trait the reviewers of her day often found surprising - and sometimes disturbing - in a female, Quaker writer. With great respect for psychological realism and in a polished, often sensuous, style, her fiction explores variously the awakening of sexuality in adolescence, the destructive consequences of self-denial and sexual repression, and the sexual loneliness of middle-aged women. It is, however, the carefully crafted
language: English
title: Jessamyn West
titlecomplete: Jessamyn West (Twayne's United States Authors Series)
publisher: Twayne Pub