At once criminal and savior, clown and creator, antagonist and mediator, the character of trickster has made frequent appearances in works by writers the world over. As Margaret Atwood observed, trickster gods ""stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands; they operate where things are joined together and, thus, can also fall apart."" A shaping force in American literature, trickster has appeared in such characters as Huckleberry Finn, Rinehart, Sula, and Nanapush. Usually a figure both culturally specific and transcendent, trickster leads the way to the unconscious, the concealed, and the seemingly unattainable. Trickster Lives offers thirteen new and challenging interpretations of trickster in American writing, including essays on works by African American, Native American, Pacific Rim, and Latino writers, as well as an examination of trickster politics. This innovative collection of work conveys the trickster's unmistakable imprint on the modern world.

The discovery and mining of the Comstock Lode in Nevada forever changed the mining culture of the American West. Using the pen name Dan De Quille, in 1876 William Wright published "The Big Bonanza," the best-known contemporary account of the Comstock Lode mines. Previously, however, in nearly fifty newspaper accounts from 1860 to 1863, De Quille had documented the development of the early Comstock with a frankness, abundance of detail, sense of immediacy, and excitement largely absent from his book. Donnelyn Curtis and Lawrence I. Berkove have gathered those accounts for the first time in "Before" The Big Bonanza.

De Quille describes the amazing transformation of the Comstock in less than four years from miscellaneous tent camps and primitive mining sites to an incredible complex of underground shafts and tunnels beneath a group of wealth-producing cities, with modern buildings, state-of-the-art mills, orderly streets, and traffic jams. He captures the vitality of the inhabitants' resolution and resourcefulness as they survive destructive storms and being cut off from supplies and entertainment, and he chronicles the events that kept Nevada and California in the Union. While reporting the prevailing violence of brawling and dueling and anti-Indian prejudice, De Quille at the same time conveys his thoughtful observations on the significance to democracy and civilization of the existence of such license.

This trove of columns, collected from a variety of newspapers, is history in the making and additionally casts new light on the life and rapidly developing art of De Quille, the biographer of the Comstock and one of the most versatile and accomplished authors of the Old West.

Sagebrush School is a term applied to a group of writers who spent their creative years in Nevada from the 1860s to the early twentieth century - its most illustrious representative being Mark Twain. Yet most of their work was never republished from the periodicals in which it first appeared and today remains largely unknown to many scholars and aficionados of Western literature. Lawrence I. Berkove, acknowledged as the leading authority on this body of literature, has assembled an exceptional collection that rescues the lively works of the Sagebrush School from the dusty archives in which they have languished. ""The Sagebrush Anthology"", which enlarges Mark Twain's circle to encompass the Sagebrush Bohemians through a compelling blend of humorous and serious fiction, memoir, nonfiction, letters, and poetry, contains sixty-seven selections - seven by Twain - representing outstanding work by accomplished Sagebrushers Dan De Quille, Sam Davis, Joe Goodman, and Rollin Daggett, plus pieces by lesser-known writers such as Arthur McEwen, Alf Doten, and Fred Hart. Berkove's introduction recounts the history of the school and identifies and analyzes its main thematic and stylistic characteristics. He shows that Sagebrush literature records and reflects the collision of the last generation of frontiersmen with the new culture of technology, industry, and big business - men of talent, imagination, and integrity driven to work out distinctive ways of coping with an unresponsive system of justice, an economy tilted toward the rich, and a society that impinged on individual liberties.

Sagebrush School is a term applied to a group of writers who spent their creative years in Nevada from the 1860s to the early twentieth century - its most illustrious representative being Mark Twain. Yet most of their work was never republished from the periodicals in which it first appeared and today remains largely unknown to many scholars and aficionados of Western literature. Lawrence I. Berkove, acknowledged as the leading authority on this body of literature, has assembled an exceptional collection that rescues the lively works of the Sagebrush School from the dusty archives in which they have languished. ""The Sagebrush Anthology"", which enlarges Mark Twain's circle to encompass the Sagebrush Bohemians through a compelling blend of humorous and serious fiction, memoir, nonfiction, letters, and poetry, contains sixty-seven selections - seven by Twain - representing outstanding work by accomplished Sagebrushers Dan De Quille, Sam Davis, Joe Goodman, and Rollin Daggett, plus pieces by lesser-known writers such as Arthur McEwen, Alf Doten, and Fred Hart. Berkove's introduction recounts the history of the school and identifies and analyzes its main thematic and stylistic characteristics. He shows that Sagebrush literature records and reflects the collision of the last generation of frontiersmen with the new culture of technology, industry, and big business - men of talent, imagination, and integrity driven to work out distinctive ways of coping with an unresponsive system of justice, an economy tilted toward the rich, and a society that impinged on individual liberties.