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picaresque novel Middle Passage (1990) blendsthe international history of slavery with a sea taleechoing Moby-Dick. Dreamer (1998) re-imaginesthe assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.Robert Olen Butler (1945- ), born in Illinois anda veteran of the Vietnam War, writes aboutVietnamese refugees in Louisiana in their ownvoices in A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain(1992). His stories in Tabloid Dreams (1996) —inspired by zany news headlines — were enlargedinto the humorous novel Mr. Spaceman (2000), inwhich a space alien learns English from watchingtelevision and abducts a bus full of tourists inorder to interview them on his spaceship.Native-American authors from the regioninclude part-Chippewa Louise Erdrich, who hasset a series of novels in her native North Dakota.Gerald Vizenor (1935- ) gives a comic, postmodernportrait of contemporary Native-Americanlife in Darkness at Saint Louis Bearheart (1978)and Griever: An American Monkey King in China(1987). Vizenor’s Chancers (2000) deals withskeletons buried outside of their homelands.Popular Syrian-American novelist MonaSimpson (1957- ), who was born in Wisconsin, isthe author of Anywhere But Here (1986), a look atmother-daughter relationships.The Mountain WestThe western interior of the United States is alargely wild area that stretches along the majesticRocky Mountains running slantwise fromMontana at the Canadian border to the hills ofTexas on the U.S. border with Mexico. Ranchingand mining have long provided the region’seconomic backbone, and the Anglo tradition inthe region emphasizes an independent frontierspirit.Western literature often incorporates conflict.Traditional enemies in the 19th-centuryWest are the cowboy versus the Indian, thefarmer/settler versus the outlaw, the rancherversus the cattle rustler. Recent antagonistsinclude the oilman versus the ecologist, thedeveloper versus the archaeologist, and the citizenactivist versus the representative of nuclearand military facilities, many of which are housedin the sparsely populated West.One writer has cast a long shadow over westernwriting, much as William Faulkner did in theSouth. Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) records thepassing of the western wilderness. In his masterpieceAngle of Repose (1971), a historianimagines his educated grandparents’ move to the“wild” West. His last book surveys his life in theWest as a writer: Where the Bluebird Sings to theLemonade Springs (1992). For a quarter century,Stegner directed Stanford University’s writingprogram; his list of students reads like a “who’swho” of western writing: Raymond Carver, KenKesey, Thomas McGuane, Larry McMurtry, N.Scott Momaday, Tillie Olsen, and Robert Stone.Stegner also influenced the contemporaryMontana school of writers associated withMcGuane, Jim Harrison, and some works ofRichard Ford, as well as Texas writers likeMcMurtry.Novelist Thomas McGuane (1939- ) typicallydepicts one man going alone into a wildarea, where he engages in an escalatingconflict. His works include The Sporting Club(1968) and The Bushwacked Piano (1971), inwhich the hero travels from Michigan to Montanaon a demented mission of courtship. McGuane’senthusiasm for hunting and fishing has led criticsto compare him with Ernest Hemingway.Michigan-born Jim Harrison (1937- ), likeMcGuane, spent many years living on a ranch. Inhis first novel, Wolf: A False Memoir (1971), aman seeks to view a wolf in the wild in hopes ofchanging his life. His later, more pessimistic fictionincludes Legends of the Fall (1979) and TheRoad Home (1998).In Richard Ford’s Montana novel Wildlife(1990), the desolate landscape counterpoints afamily’s breakup. Story writer, eco-critic, and147