The vivid imagination, robust humor, and profound sense of place of the Indians of Oregon are revealed in this anthology, which gathers together hitherto scattered and often inaccessible legends originally transcribed and translated by scholars such as Archie Phinney, Melville Jacobs, and Franz Boas.

"Reading the Fire" engages America's "first literatures," traditional Native American tales and legends, as literary art and part of our collective imaginative heritage. This revised edition of a book first published to critical acclaim in 1983 includes four new essays.

Drawing on ethnographic data and regional folklore, Jarold Ramsey moves from origin and trickster narratives and Indian ceremonial texts, into interpretations of stories from the Nez Perce, Clackamas Chinook, Coos, Wasco, and Tillamook repertories, concluding with a set of essays on the neglected subject of Native literary responses to contact with Euroamericans. In his finely worked, erudite analyses, he mediates between an author-centered, print-based narrative tradition and one that is oral, anonymous, and tribal, adducing parallels between Native texts and works by Shakespeare, Yeats, Beckett, and Faulkner.

"A gathering of brilliant essays by the most literarily sensitive of commentators on Native American myths and tales."--Karl Kroeber, "Traditional Literatures of the American Indian"

"Jarold Ramsey has emerged as one of the most skilled and articulate commentators on American Indian literature active today."--J. Barre Toelken, "Western Folklore"

"A balanced, steady intelligence informs these essays. . . . It is a book that should be read by anyone who teaches American literature or specializes in American literary studies."--Larry Evers, "Western Humanities Review"

"American scholarship needs more of what Ramsey has done here: his work is a careful, detailed, but also sympathetic and profound study of the myths he has examined."--Dell Skeels, "Pacific Northwest Quarterly"

The Punishment of the Stingy, first published in 1901, has become a classic of American Indian literature. George Bird Grinnell's retelling of Indian tales like The Star Boy, The Girl Who Was the Ring, The First Medicine Lodge, and Nothing Child retains the humor and mystery of their sources. Featuring the twin themes of generosity and stinginess, this is the only one of Grinnell's collections to embrace narratives from a number of tribes--Blackfoot, Pawnee, Blood, Piegan, and Chinook. Plucky young heroes emerge from obscurity through their generosity; the closefisted draw down supernatural punishments befitting their cold and hardened spirits. Jarold Ramsey writes, The history of the Plains Indians as we have it would be unthinkable without the keen eye and honest, diligent pen of George Bird Grinnell. With him, it is still possible after eighty or one hundred years to leap through that historical lightning door that shut so suddenly on the Old West. Among the heroic Pawnees, Cheyennes, Blackfeet, and their neighbors of long ago, stories like these will continue to be our horses, and Grinnell our faithful overland guide. Jarold Ramsey is a professor of English at the Uni

The vivid imagination, robust humor, and profound sense of place of the Indians of Oregon are revealed in this anthology, which gathers together hitherto scattered and often inaccessible legends originally transcribed and translated by scholars such as Archie Phinney, Melville Jacobs, and Franz Boas.