Women Writers of the American West, 1833��927 recovers the names and works of hundreds of women who wrote about the American West during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
some of them long forgotten and others better known novelists, poets, memoirists, and historians such as Willa Cather and Mary Austin Holley. Nina Baym mined literary and cultural histories,
anthologies, scholarly essays, catalogs, advertisements, and online resources to debunk critical assumptions that women did not publish about the West as much as they did about other regions.
Elucidating a substantial body of nearly 650 books of all kinds by more than 300 writers, Baym reveals how the authors showed women making lives for themselves in the West, how they
represented the diverse region, and how they represented themselves.
