Annual William Howard and Hazel Butler Peters Lecture
“Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region"
Both Utahns and friends, Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto made their prolific careers as western writers. Yet, both men had strong ties back East. Indeed, DeVoto spent more years in Cambridge, Massachusetts than he did in Ogden, Utah, and Stegner spent his last years living in Vermont. This presentation describes the vexed relationship men of western letters had with the East in the twentieth century, and how the West’s foremost writers unintentionally reinforced the very regional stereotypes they protested.
Flannery Burke
Flannery Burke is professor of American Studies at Saint Louis University. She is the author of three books: From Greenwich Village to Taos; A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century; and Back East: How Westerners Invented a Region. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, Professor Burke attended Bryn Mawr College outside Philadelphia and received a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has also lived in Los Angeles; West Orange, New Jersey; Dallas; and Oslo. Her current book project, Hercules Jr. and the Lost Territory, is a study of the area around Las Vegas, New Mexico (the other Las Vegas), which explores community resilience, educational experimentation, and creativity in the rural West.