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Ing to find only one paragraph in the CLHUS devoted to those topics. In contrast, the LHAW includes two long chapters on the nature essay, and most of its other chapters at least mention the literary treatment of ecology and the nuclear peril. This is not to suggest that the writers of other regions have ignored these topics- Bernard Malamud’s God’s Grace (not mentioned in the CLHUS) is one example that proves otherwise; my point is that it would have been difficult, if not almost impossible, to write about twentieth-century Western literature without devoting more than one paragraph to the fate of the earth. “You are suggesting,” some may say, “that instead of writing literary history, we should churn out political programs.” Not at all. But to provide for American literature a lengthy history with no more than a paragraph on two subjects of such great concern to the writers of almost half the nation is to present a misleading account.
Not only is the CLHUS misleading in that respect, but it also says, in effect, that Westerners have no literary heritage. “Know thyself” is an injunction we can pursue only partially if we fail to study what our region’s authors have to say. That is not to say we cannot survive if we read only Shakespeare (or no literature at all, for that matter); it is only to suggest that however much Shakespeare tells us about the human condition, he has not written about that condition as it exists in the lands of the American West. Doubtless some Englishmen can be found who have never read Hamlet, Paradise Lost, or The Pickwick Papers. Is it any less regrettable that because of the CLHUS’s omissions, some Westerners may never have the pleasure of reading Honey in the Horn, The Big Sky, and Angle of Repose?
Not, some will reply, if mentioning those novels means the exclusion of works by Emerson, Melville, or Whitman. “Let in Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour,” as the case is often put by its opponents, “and goodbye Thoreau and Hawthorne.” But such a view of the canon misunderstands its nature. True, it is not infinite in its capacity, but neither must it be confined to only what can be crammed into an introductory anthology. When biologists discover a new species, they do not feel obliged to deny the existence of an old one. Nor (to continue the analogy) does a biologist who uses a telescope deny the usefulness of information gathered by colleagues who use microscopes. The whole of