Arizona republican., 1909-05-12
ARIZONA IN LITERATURE
 IS GREATLY MAL|GNED
DANE COOLIDGE IN THE STAN.
 FORD AlUMNUS.
ADiscussion of the Work of Lewis,
 Mister and Others.

Dane Coolidge, the naturalist and writer well known throughout Arizona, and especially we'll known about Tempe and Phoenix. has in the current number of the Stanford Alumnus an article on Arizona in Literature" MT. Coolidge has written much about this territory and the territory is better for all that he has written. He has just completed a 100000 word novel deal
 ing with the famous Tonto Basin cat i tie war. Concerning the manner in which Arizona has been given the worst of it by writers of short stories and writers of plays he says The name of Arizona. either in the drama or in literature, suggests at once lawlessness, romance and mys- l tery. a land where any brutal crime may be committed, where any love af fair is legitimate and where positively l anything can happen. Naturally. then, mass of literature, mostly written in the east, has risen up under the name, colOred by what has already been writ ten and fixing still more firmly in the American mind the picture that will probably endure forever. Without at tempting to correct this preconception -the age of miracles being long past it will be interesting, nevertheless to look into the matter philosophically with view to tracing out some of the greater influences which have given this lurid caste to a literature which. in England and the far east, is recog
 nized as distinctly western.
 
 day-the day that Francis Bret Harte wrote The Luck of Roaring Camp" This story. which to this day is re- garded by all competent eastern critics as the touchstone of western literature is briefly the account of the birth of a child to an unfortunate woman in a western mining camp. and of this won
 derful moral influence over the rough, red-shirted men who cared for him after his mothers untimely death. Since The Luck was published. in the second number of the Overland Month
 ly. there have been hundreds of stories written upon it's plot, and most of them have sold. It is apparently the one best western plot, but. as often hap pens. the first story, the one that es- tablished the type and developed the eastern appetite. was not appreciated at home. In the introduction to his complete works the author tells how ''The Luck" was written by him for the second number of the Overland Monthly-of which he was the editor in order to make up for the lack of distinctive California romance But when the copy was sent to the printer A |. H.. and religious turn of mind, refused to set it up; his proofreader. young lady of delicacy and refinement. re- fused likewise to O. K. the proof: and the publisher. being of a conservative nature, refused to allow the story to run Thereupon Mir. Harte threatened to resign as editor, and the story went in under protest, ;ne decision being left to the great reading public. The western public, with its usual purblind provincialism. united in condemning the story, insofar as it could be in duced to read it at all. but when the pony express came galloping back from the great east, then, gentle read CT western literature was made in dayi
 The eastern editors with one accord pronounced it the real thing and the Atlantic Monthly requested the author. upon the most flattering terms. tn give them another story like Luck The Outcasts of Poker Fla" Mig gles" and other western classics fol- lowed in quick succession. and today rhe pages of Harper's Scribner s Cen tury and the Atlantic Monthly still feature echoes of The Luck" It was great story and yet after reading it over I cannot help agreeing with the moral printer. the refined proof reader and the conservative publisher. And like wise, when I see play like "The Great Divide" or read some Arizona story written in New York. I cannot but re- gret that a man who combined such cold brutality with such maudlin sen timentality should have given the formative touch to western romance. But the deed is done now, and there is nothing left but to trace out the i'm fluence of Bret Harte, for it has left its mark even in Arizona literature, and cast against it those other influ- ences, which, while now latent and half buried in the territory might if not overshadowed in their infancy have developed into a sturdy and equally distinctive growth.
 Of the three men who have done | most to make the name of Arizona known in literature-OWen Wister Al 1 fred Henry Lewis and Stewart Edward ! White-Alfred Henry Lewis, in my opinion, most truly reflects the spirit of the olden times, the spirit that is expressed by the older generation in | Arizona today. His Old Cattleman is the type of those early pioneers who | rooted out the Apaches and the Mexi- ! cans and took the country, regardless. ! Yet while MT. Lewis honored the ter