and From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's.
Burke applied the "Page 99 Test" to her latest book, Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region, with the following results:
Page 99 appears in the center section of Back East and reveals a mainstream opinion of the eastern United States held by many westerners in the twentieth century. The page begins with a complete sentence: “As it had in ‘The Plundered Province,’ Wall Street, once again, played the role of the East.” The author of the article “The Plundered Province” was Bernard DeVoto, a writer for Harper’s Magazine, a Harvard graduate, and an ardent conservationist originally from Ogden, Utah. In “The Plundered Province” and again in later articles referenced on page 99, DeVoto excoriated eastern corporations who extracted natural resources and labor from the American West and westerners who accepted and even encouraged such economic exploitation. As a westerner who had succeeded in the East, DeVoto considered himself an expert on both regions. As I write on page 99, DeVoto identified himself in the eastern press as a man who was “informed by a western sensibility but understood eastern culture.”Visit Flannery Burke's website.
A browser who opened Back East to page 99 would receive an excellent introduction to the book’s primary themes. The book addresses how westerners imagined the eastern United States in the twentieth century, and DeVoto, as one of the most prolific and authoritative writers on the American West in the American East, well encapsulates the ways in which westerners both accepted and countered eastern expectations in their presentations of their home region. That these expectations influenced the material lives of westerners as much as it did their cultural and intellectual ones – from mining to forestry, ranching, farming, and tourism – is an important finding of the book and one foreshadowed by DeVoto’s articles of the 1930s and 1940s.
Page 99 also well reflects the structure of Back East, which is divided into three parts. Parts 1 and 3 explore western views of the American East from the margins of American culture. Part 1 addresses midwestern presentations of the East that non-midwesterners frequently overlooked or overshadowed while demonstrating that Chicago appeared as both a western and an eastern city in twentieth-century American culture. Part 3 examines the outlooks of westerners marginalized by their race, their status as citizens of Native nations, their language, or their efforts to farm on the arid Plains. Although such westerners’ perceptions of the American East appeared less frequently in magazines like Harper’s and universities like Harvard, they illustrate the ways in which regional narratives opened and foreclosed opportunities for greater national understanding. Part 2, in which page 99 appears, describes popular, well-published authors like DeVoto and his dear friend Wallace Stegner, whose views of the American West and the American East were often consistent with the mythology of the frontier. Page 99 illustrates how DeVoto and Stegner furthered that mythology even as they endeavored to undo its harms.
--Marshal Zeringue