The Great Plains are as rich and integral a part of American literature as they are of the North American landscape. In this volume the stories, poems, and essays that have described, celebrated, and defined the region evoke the world of the American prairie from the first recorded days of Native history to the realities of life on a present-day reservation, from the arrival of European explorers to the experience of early settlers, from the splendor of the vast and rolling grasslands to the devastation of the Dust Bowl. Several essays look to the future and explore changes that would embolden the people of the Plains to continue to call home this place they have learned to value in spite of its persistent challenges. The infinite variety of the Great Plains landscape and its people unfolds in works by writers as diverse as Willa Cather, Loren Eiseley, Louise Erdrich (Ojibwe), Diane Glancy (Cherokee), Langston Hughes, Wes Jackson, Garrison Keillor, William Least Heat-Moon, Kathleen Norris, Wright Morris, Francis Parkman, O. E. Rolvaag, Mari Sandoz, William Stafford, Mark Twain, Douglas Unger, James Welch (Blackfeet), and Canadians Sharon Butala and Sinclair Ross. From tribal histories to the impressions of travelers today, from tales of isolation and nature's furious storms to accounts of efforts to build communities, from flights of fancy to nuanced observations of the ecology of the grasslands, this comprehensive volume provides a history of the intricate relationships of land and people in the Great Plains.

The Great Plains have long been fertile ground for literature. The Nature of the Place is a comprehensive study of novels and stories by writers of that region. Drawing upon studies by cultural geographers, historians, and literary critics, Diane Dufva Quantic creates an expansive portrait of the region, its history, and its literature. Quantic offers insightful readings of a staggering array of authors, including Willa Cather, Wright Morris, Mari Sandoz, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frederick Manfred, Wallace Stegner, and Bess Streeter Aldrich. She considers the literature of the Plains and neighboring regions from early representations in such works as James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie, published in 1827, through such contemporary authors as Douglas Unger and Ron Hansen. For all its concentration upon individual writers and works, however, The Nature of the Place is marked by Quantic's sustained attention to the region's collective social and cultural history. Central to that cumulative focus is the constant, immensely fruitful clash between the myths of the Great Plains - myths represented by such phrases as the Garden of the World, the Great American Desert, the Closed Frontier, Manifest Destiny, and the Safety Valve - and the infinitely more complex history of the region. Quantic is always aware of how that clash, while most productive of literature, has made a final, definitive vision of the Great Plains impossible. In so vast and changeable a region it is only fitting that, as Wright Morris once remarked, "Many things would come to pass, but the nature of the place would remain a matter of opinion".