Read the beginning of the Introduction from The Golden West: Fifty Years of Bison Books, Edited by Alicia Christensen, Introduction by David Wrobel:

"This superb collection of some of the most enduring writings on the American West is a fitting marker of the fiftieth anniversary of the University of Nebraska Press’s Bison Books imprint. A half century of republication of classic western literature, history, and folklore is not to be taken lightly. Just as The Portable Faulkner (1946) played a vital role in resurrecting that author’s reputation in the late 1940s and establishing his now hallowed place in the American literary canon, Bison Books’s publication of classic works such as The Lewis and Clark Journals, Mari Sandoz’s Crazy Horse, Wallace Stegner’s The Gathering of Zion, and Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! has been a great service to the humanities on a national as well as a regional level. These works have shaped the reading public’s consciousness of the richness, drama, and deep tragedy of the western American experience. Separately this anthology’s eighteen selections span the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a range of genres from the novel and the poem to the diary, oral history, biography, memoir, and narrative history, and will draw readers back to the individual works; together they serve as a powerful reminder of the national significance of western writing."

To read a longer excerpt or to purchase The Golden West, visit http://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/product/Golden-West,674792.aspx.