"Flora and fauna of the wilderness is captured in this artistic alphabet book by author Michelle E. Walch and artist John Maddin. Filled with a variety of landscape marvels, Letters of the West invites younger readers to learn their ABCs through delightfully bold and whimsical illustrations."--

From the time that George Bernard Shaw remarked that “Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely,” West’s writings and her politics have elicited strong reactions. This collection of her letters—the first ever published—has been culled from the estimated ten thousand she wrote during her long life. The more than two hundred selected letters follow this spirited author, critic, and journalist from her first feminist campaign for women’s suffrage when she was a teenager through her reassessments of the twentieth century written in 1982, in her ninetieth year. The letters, which are presented in full, include correspondence with West’s famous lover H. G. Wells and with Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, Noel Coward, and many others; offer pronouncements on such contemporary authors as Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and provide new insights into her battles against misogyny, fascism, and communism. West deliberately fashions her own biography through this intensely personal correspondence, challenging rival accounts of her groundbreaking professional career, her frustrating love life, and her tormented family relations. Engrossing to read, the collection sheds new light on this important figure and her social and literary milieu.

After they met in 1922, Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf began a passionate relationship that lasted until Woolf's death in 1941. Their revealing correspondence leaves no aspect of their lives untouched. This volume, which features over 500 letters spanning 19 years, includes the writings of both of these literary icons.

"Letters From The West; Or A Caution To Emigrants, written by John S. Wright and published in 1819, presents the impressions of the author about opportunities for settlement in the Ohio Valley. Having just completed a six month trip there, where he had gone "as a plain practical farmer, to judge for myself, the merits of a country so highly extolled," Wright came back profoundly disillusioned. He believed his own experience demonstrated that before any man removed his family to a distant country, he ought first to visit it and judge of it himself. Wright's collection of letters serves as a forceful reminder that not everyone found the West to his liking"--Foreward.

"It is like a fairyland." So Laura Ingalls Wilder described her 1915 voyage to San Francisco to visit her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane. Laura's husband, Almanzo, was unable to leave their Missouri farm and it is her faithful letters home, vividly describing every detail of her journey, that have been gathered here. Includes 24 pages of exciting photographs and completely redesigned jacket art.

Lummis' other set of letters, to the Los Angeles times, are well-known as the basis for his A Tramp across the continent (Chas. Scribner's Sons, 1892). These are the 24 letters written to the Chillicothe Leader. They are more robust than the Times versions, which were more deliberately crafted, more commercial. An essential for Western collections. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR