Cathryn Halverson – författare

Examining an eclectic group of western women’s autobiographical texts—canonical and otherwise—Playing House in the American West argues for a distinct regional literary tradition characterised by strategic representations of unconventional domestic life. The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.” From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbours and eastern readers alike. The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles. Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation.The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.

Examines an eclectic group of western women’s autobiographical texts—canonical and otherwise—Playing House in the American West argues for a distinct regional literary tradition characterized by strategic representations of unconventional domestic life.The controlling metaphor Cathryn Halverson uses in her engrossing study is “playing house.” From Caroline Kirkland and Laura Ingalls Wilder to Willa Cather and Marilynne Robinson, from the mid-nineteenth to the late-twentieth centuries, western authors have persistently embraced wayward or eccentric housekeeping to prove a woman’s difference from western neighbors and eastern readers alike.The readings in Playing House investigate the surprising textual ends to which westerners turn the familiar terrain of the home: evaluating community; arguing for different conceptions of race and class; and perhaps most especially, resisting traditional gender roles. Western women writers, Halverson argues, render the home as a stage for autonomy, resistance, and imagination rather than as a site of sacrifice and obligation.The western women examined in Playing House in the American West are promoted and read as representatives of a region, as insiders offering views of distant and intriguing ways of life, even as they conceive of themselves as outsiders. By playing with domestic conventions, they recast the region they describe, portraying the West as a place that fosters female agency, individuality, and subjectivity.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, famed Atlantic Monthly editor Ellery Sedgwick chose to publish a group of nontraditional writers he later referred to as "Faraway Women," working-class authors living in the western United States far from his base in Boston. Cathryn Halverson surveys these enormously popular Atlantic Contributors, among them a young woman raised in Oregon lumber camps, homesteaders in Wyoming, Idaho, and Alberta, and a world traveler who called Los Angeles and Honolulu home.Faraway Women and the "Atlantic Monthly" examines gender and power as it charts an archival journey connecting the least remembered writers and readers of the time with one of its most renowned literary figures, Gertrude Stein. It shows how distant friends, patrons, Publishers, and readers inspired, fostered, and consumed the innovative life narratives of these unlikely authors, and it also tracks their own strategies for seizing creative outlets and forging new protocols of public expression. Troubling binary categories of east and west, national and regional, and cosmopolitan and local, the book recasts the coordinates of early twentieth-century American literature.

The first biography of a best-selling travel writer dedicated to the pursuit of leisure, freedom, and experience Despite the challenges she faced as an average southern Black woman of her time, Juanita Harrison transcended expectations, earning a unique place in African American and literary history. Over the course of more than fifty years, she travelled constantly, first throughout the US and then throughout the world. To fund her trips, she took on short-term jobs as maid, cook, and nurse, never committing to any one household. Always on the move, she made it a rule to travel alone, and she had a penchant for 'passing,' not as white but as local. Her wanderlust was less aspirational and upwardly mobile than dedicated to the pursuit of leisure, freedom, and experience. "It's my life to see and enjoy," she declared. In 1936, she published My Great, Wide, Beautiful World, a travelogue that charts her life between 1927 and 1935. A compilation of letters she sent to friends, employers, and patrons during her travels, the book was an immediate success, running through nine printings within ten months and becoming a bestseller for that year. The illustrious Atlantic Monthly published excerpts, the book was reviewed in newspapers and magazines nationwide, and it attracted a remarkably diverse readership, sparking the enthusiasm of Black working-class library patrons, white women's book clubs, Japanese American journalists, Harlem Renaissance luminaries, and many others. It came back into print in 1996, ensuring her legacy would endure. A Born Writer is the first biography of this fascinating woman who found a uniquely rewarding way to live and work that many would envy today. Combining micro histories, literary criticism, and biography- and despite limited archival records- Cathryn Halverson skillfully traces Harrison from her birth in the bitterly divided South to her death in Hawai'i, tracking her varied experiences along the way in New York, Havana, Paris, Madrid, Cairo, Mumbai, Kobe, Buenos Aires, and many other places. The resulting portrait shows a woman who transcended all kinds of borders- political, social, and cultural- to experience a freedom rarely available to women, and especially women of color, in the early-to-mid twentieth century, an achievement that continues to resonate.