The ornamental hermit : people and places of the new West / Robert Murray Davis.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Davis, Robert Murray.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Davis, Robert Murray.

West (U.S.)--Description and travel.

West (U.S.).

West (U.S.)--Social life and customs.

West (U.S.)--Biography.

Genre:

Biographies.

Physical Description:

x, 197 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Lubbock : Texas Tech University Press, [2004]

Summary:

In eighteenth-century England, some wealthy people built ruins on their estates, hired hermits to inhabit them, and took guests to view the picturesque results.

While no one hires ornamental hermits anymore, society as a whole supports people such as Thoreau or Edward Abbey who step aside to comment on ordinary life as critics or would-be prophets, yet who still get to head into town for the comforts of civilization.

Robert Murray Davis stepped aside to look at America, and what he saw changed his view of himself and his country. He discovered that he agreed less with Thoreau and Abbey, and even less with European critics, and more with Chuck Berry -- glad, mostly, to be living in the USA as he crossed and recrossed it, heading west from his boyhood home in Missouri to California and many points between.

In these essays Davis celebrates attempts to create or re-create, such as the Navajo Nation's radio station; the efforts of the young mayor of Blackwater, Missouri, to revive his town; and Moab, Utah's, reinvention of itself to survive boom and bust and even Abbey.

Some of those attempts he views more wryly: the Texas Panhandle's two vertical monuments; Forest Lawn and the Gene Autry Museum, trying to deny death and reality; the Grapes of Wrath Festival in Sallisaw, Oklahoma. But even events and artifacts verging on the ludicrous can be appreciated for the energy put into them.

And around and between all of them is the American West, often apparently dead and empty yet still able to evoke complex emotions and to jar the traveler out of self-absorption, self-pity, self-regard.

Contents:

The shortest way home

You coulda been a contender

Fathers and sons

Back roads

Tulsa time

The world of Steinbeck's Joads

Steinbeck at the ends of the trail

Kicking 66

Flying in the heartland

Running on empty

Panhandling

Famous for fifteen minutes

Breakfast : the real American cuisine

Consult your local listing

Blackwater comes back

Moab, Utah : is there life after Abbey?

Tight fit in the Jemez Valley

Slovakia and Oklahoma

Oklahoma border line

Who mourns the gepids?

Not in Kansas

The ornamental hermit

Death in the west : a multi-cultural adventure

Gene Autry, Oklahoma : different slants

The myth of a west.

ISBN:

0896725235

OCLC:

53469434