Kansas Literature is diverse in its forms, themes and points of view, but it is unified in that it all takes place within this 200 by 400-mile rectangle. The study of Kansas Literature alerts us to many important physical, historical and cultural images of Kansas—all from writers intent upon understanding and thinking about our quality of life.
Kansas means something different to each writer, as it does to each person who comes into contact with the state. To Coronado, our first tourist—he came up from Mexico in 1541 with expectations of golden cities—Kansas was disappointment. Kansas wealth was not in gold, but in land. Poet Ronald Johnson, of Ashland, writes:
On that soil, later to be stripped
for prairie sod-houses,
wild turkeys
flocked among the persimmons
their flesh succulent from golden sand plums,
bitter with china-berries.
The coyotes,
their eyes aglow on the dark horizon, barked at a moon
above the lowing
of buffalo, heard twenty miles
away.
And cottonwood trees, from whose buds
the Indians
made clear yellow, scattered their drift in spring
filling the gullies.
The Quivirans
were to tell Coronado
'the things
where you are now
are of great importance.'
In the same poem, Johnson chastises Coronado: "O Coronado, all country/ is round to/ those who lose sight of the/ ground." You'll read Johnson's poem, and others quoted in this introduction, in The Kansas Experience in Poetry, one of the texts for this Kansas Literature course. I'm particularly fond of the Coronado theme as it relates to our sense of the Kansas landscape. Eugene Fitch Ware, of Fort Scott, who wrote under the pen name of Ironquill, chides: "Never land so hunger-stricken/ Could a Latin race re-mold;/ They could conquer heat or cold-/ Die for glory or for gold-/ But not make a desert quicken." Note the racism of the late 19th century creeping into a poem celebrating the accomplishments of European—read white—farmers. Other poets make similar points, though, about the hard work of converting what seemed like desert plains into an agricultural paradise. Harry Kemp, a tramp poet who attended the University of Kansas, celebrates the "marriage with the plow" that turned the Kansas land to gold. Gold, of course, is wheat: the color of it just before harvest, and the value of it once brought to market.
The contrasting images of Kansas, desert vs. agricultural garden, are constants in Kansas literature. Two famous Kansas songs reflect this: Dr. Brewster Higley's "Western Home" and Frank Baker's "The Lane County Bachelor."
Western Home
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day.
A home, a home where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the sky is not clouded all day.
Oh, give me the gale of the Solomon vale,
Where life streams with buoyancy flow,
On the banks of the Beaver, where seldom if ever
Any poisonous herbage doth grow.
Oh, give me the land where the bright diamond sand
Throws its light from the glittering stream,
Where glideth along the graceful white swan
Like a maid in a heavenly dream.
I love the wild flowers in this bright land of ours;
I love too the wild curlew's scream,
The bluffs and white rocks and antelope flocks
That graze on the hillsides so green.
How often at night, when the heavens are bright
With the light of the glittering stars,
Have I stood here amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds this of ours.
The air is so pure, the breezes so free,
The zephyrs so balmy and light,
I would not exchange my home here to range
Forever in azure so bright.
The Lane County BachelorTop of Page | Bottom of Page
Frank Baker's my name and a bachelor I am,
I'm keeping old batch on an elegant plan.
You'll find me out west in the county of Lane,
I'm starving to death on a government claim.
My house it is built of the natural soil,
The walls are erected according to Hoyle.
The roof has no pitch but is level and plain,
And I always get wet when it happens to rain.
Hurrah for Lane County, the land of the free,
The home of the grasshopper, bed bug and flea
I'll sing loud its praises and tell of its fame,
While starving to death on a government claim.
My clothes they are ragged, my language is rough,
My bread is case-hardened both solid and tough.
The dough is scattered all over the room,
And the floor it gets scared at the sight of a broom.
My dishes are scattered all over the bed,
They are covered with sorghum and Government bread.
Still I have a good time and live at my ease
On common sop-sorghum, old bacon and grease.
Then come to Lane County, here is a home for you all,
Where the winds never cease and the rains never fall,
And the sun never sets but will always remain
Till it burns you all up on a Government claim.
How happy I feel when I crawl into bed,
And a rattlesnake rattles a tune at my head.
And the gay little centipede, void of all fear,
Crawls over my neck and down into my ear.
And the little bed bugs so cheerful and bright,
They keep me a-laughing two-thirds of the night.
And the gay little flea with sharp tacks in his toes,
Plays "Why don't you catch me" all over my nose.
Hurrah for Lane County, hurrah for the west,
Where the farmers and laborers are ever at rest.
For there's nothing to do but to sweetly remain
And starve like a man on a Government claim.
How happy am I on my government claim,
For I've nothing to lose nor I've nothing to gain.
I've nothing to eat and I've nothing to wear,
And nothing from nothing is honest and fair.
Oh, it is here I am solid and here I will stay,
For my money is all gone and I can't get away.
There is nothing that makes a man hard and profane,
Like starving to death on a Government claim.
Hurrah for Lane County, where blizzards arise,
Where the winds never cease and the flea never dies.
Come join in the chorus and sing of its fame,
You poor hungry hoboes that's starved on the claim.
No, don't get discouraged, you poor hungry men,
For we are all here as free as a pig in a pen.
Just stick to your homestead and battle the fleas
And look to your Maker to send you a breeze.
Now all you claim holders I hope you will stay
And chew your hardtack till you are toothless and grey.
But as for myself I'll no longer remain
And starve like a dog on a Government claim.
Farewell to Lane County, farewell to the west,
I'll travel back East to the girl I love best.
I'll stop in Topeka and get me a wife,
And there shall I stay the rest of my life.
Like The Lane County Bachelor in its description of Kansas, The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum—the first text you'll read in this course—paints a bleak look at Kansas. The Wizard of Oz is probably the most influential piece of Kansas literature in determining how the world sees Kansas. Baum had lived for a time in Aberdeen, South Dakota Territory. So he knew the Great Plains. His opening description of Kansas could apply to any drought-weary Plains state:
When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else. When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at. Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was.
This passage is about Kansas, of course, but it also tells us a lot about why Dorothy reacts as she does to the contrasting fairyland of Oz, where everything is colorful and beautiful.
Other writers have seen the Kansas landscape and chosen different dominant features. Novelist Paul Wellman, of Cimarron, who wrote best-selling historical novels in the 1940s, is fascinated by the sky. Here's the opening of The Bowl of Brass:
The land was immense and flat. Two-thirds of the world appeared to be sky—the vast, ever-changing sky of the high plains—and the other third was endless landscape on which it seemed that a jackrabbit could be seen miles away. Long gradual swells of ground marched slowly toward the infinitely remote horizons, but these no more alleviated the impression of endless sameness than do the steady swells of the ocean. In another respect the high plains resembled the sea, for the levelness of their spaces made it appear that the horizons rose slightly all around at the rim of the earth, exactly as the horizons of the ocean often seem to dish up about a lonely ship. A man standing in the midst of the plain sometimes had the feeling that he was standing in an enormous shallow bowl. It was a bowl beaten by the midsummer sun and brassy with the color of the soil, and with the color of the sun-dried buffalo grass. A bowl of brass—superheated, dry as lime, with the heat haze rising clear to the edge of the world and distant objects wavering dizzily to the sight.
The metaphor of Kansas land being the ocean—usually an ocean of grass, or a sea of grass—is one of the standard clichés of description in our literature.
When William Allen White looked at our landscape, he saw its barrenness and a quality of loneliness which he turned into setting in one of his short stories, "Aqua Pura":
When the traveler has mounted to the high table land, nearly four hundred miles from Missouri, he may walk for days without seeing any green thing higher than his head. He may journey for hours on horseback, and not climb a hill, seeing before him only the level and often barren plain, scarred now and then by irrigation ditches. The even line of the horizon is seldom marred. The silence of such a scene gnaws the glamour from the heart. Men become harsh and hard; women grow withered and sodden under its blighting power. The song of wood birds is not heard; even the mournful plaint of the meadow lark loses its sentiment, where the dreary clacking drone of the wind-mill is the one song which really brings good tidings with it. Long and fiercely sounds this unrhythmical monody in the night, when the traveler lies down to rest in the little sun-burned, pine-board town. The gaunt arms of the wheel hurl its imprecations at him as he rises to resume his journey into the silence, under the great gray dome, with its canopy pegged tightly down about him everywhere.
Poet Elmer Suderman sees chaos in the open landscape:
What can we do here
on this undulating rolling endless
weary buffalo grass
where sun and sky are one,
space the final fact
evading our eye's need
to measure and record
the distance and location of things?
Who will tell us our name
here where even dreams lose their shape
and sod drags us through hard days
bewildered, confused?
What can we do but walk,
walk, walk on and on
breaking sod no man
has ever broken before?
KU poet Victor Contoski chooses the image of space:
Whoever travels into Kansas
exploring the great American desert
goes out into space
into the interstellar distances
between the lights of the prairie farms.
Finally, for many writers, landscape is incomplete without giving the sky its main character: weather. Lawrence poet John Moritz once called weather our "vertical geography." What famous Kansas novel, after all, does NOT contain a tornado? John Ise's Sod and Stubble, Langston Hughes' Not Without Laughter, Gordon Parks' The Learning Tree and Robert Day's The Last Cattle Drive all do. If we Kansans know one thing, it's the weather. Robert Day, one of the authors you'll read in this course, devotes a whole chapter to weather in The Last Cattle Drive, apologizing with the words: "I read somewhere that weather is the first refuge of a sentimental writer. I suppose so."
Contemporary writers like Day are, it seems to me, more objective and, ironically, more appreciative of Kansas than those of the nineteenth century. Instead of creating a Kansas that only reflects the values of their writing, or the artistic purposes of the work, more and more writers are creating Kansas as it is, even giving to it a control over character and plot. This is especially true of Hutchinson-born poet William Stafford, featured in this course. He, like John Ise, William Inge, and Robert Day, attended the University of Kansas, so are appropriately included in this University of Kansas Independent Study course. Stafford shows the effect of the earth on his own life, philosophy, and stance in the world:
In Response to a Question
The earth says have a place, be what that place
requires; hear the sound the birds imply
and see as deep as ridges go behind
each other. (Some people call their scenery flat,
their only picture framed by what they know:
I think around them rise a riches and a loss
too equal for their chart—but absolutely tall.)
The earth says every summer have a ranch
that's minimum: one tree, one well, a landscape
that proclaims a universe— . . .
The earth says where you live wear the kind
of color that your life is (gray shirt for me)
and by listening with the same bowed head that sings
draw all into one song, join
the sparrow on the lawn, and row that easy
way, the rage without met by the wings
within that guide you anywhere the wind blows.
Listening, I think that's what the earth says.
And:
Earth Dweller
It was all the clods at once become
precious; it was the barn, and the shed,
and the windmill, my hands, the crack
Arlie made in the axe handle: oh, let me stay
here humbly, forgotten, to rejoice in it all;
let the sun casually rise and set.
If I have not found the right place,
teach me; for, somewhere inside, the colds are
vaulted mansions, lines through the barn sing
for the saints forever, the shed and windmill
rear so glorious the sun shudders like a gong.
Now I know why people worship, carry around
magic emblems, wake up talking dreams
they teach to their children: the world speaks.
The world speaks everything to us.
It is our only friend.
For writers like Stafford, the land, with its power and beauty, is a secret to be divulged to the willing, rather than simply something to manipulate, conquer or control. In work by many recent writers, there is insight in the Kansas landscape, which, as Stafford says in another poem, "holds us up." Writing that explores the Kansas landscape, rather than simply "using" it, creates a more honest sense of what Kansas is, and how it affects real people who are not dominated by a single feature.
Top of Page | Bottom of PageWhen this land called Kansas was opened for settlement as a territory in 1854, it immediately became another kind of symbol: for freedom. The United States was torn by the slavery question. People came to the state to settle, but often to settle the issue of slave or free. From Boston came the people who settled Lawrence at the behest of the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Their supporter back east was Amos Lawrence, and they named their main street Massachusetts. From the South came Pro-slavery settlers exhorted to that cause by people like Senator David Atchison, whose name lives in the name of that Northeast Kansas town. Our literature is made much richer by its accounts of this time period. William Allen White captures the spirit of pioneering for a cause in his 1909 novel A Certain Rich Man:
All over the plains in those days, on a hundred roads like that which ran through Sycamore Ridge, men and women were moving from east to west, and, as often has happened since the beginning of time, when men have migrated, a great ethical principle was stirring in them. The pioneers do not go to the wilderness always in lust of land, but sometimes they go to satisfy their souls. The spirit of God moves in the hearts of men as it moves on the face of the waters.
Jane Smiley's novel, The All-true Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton, is set in the Lawrence of that time, and Lidie is deeply affected by the controversies and the violence that gave our state the nickname "Bleeding Kansas."
After the Civil War, Kansas was settled more rapidly, and often by Union Army veterans, who had special homesteading privileges. If you want to know why Kansas was and still is predominantly Republican in politics, look no further than the original settlers, who marched in Grand Army of the Republic parades for fifty years after the Civil War, who worshiped the name of Abraham Lincoln. Of course, many of them came here for the land and the material opportunities. Emanuel and Marcet Haldeman-Julius show this in their 1921 novel Dust, set in Southeast Kansas, another text you'll be reading in this course. In it, a broken-down Union Army veteran scolds his complaining son:
"That'll do. I don't think this is paradise no more'n you do, but we wouldn't be the first who've come with nothing but a team and made a living. You mark what I tell you, Martin, land ain't always goin' to be had so cheap and I won't be living this time another year. Before I die, I'm goin' to see your mother and you children settled. Some day, when you've got a fine farm here, you'll see the sense of what I'm doin' now and thank me for it."
After all, with settlement came reality. The land of freedom, or this "free" land for the homesteader, was full of difficulties to be overcome. Kansas was a land of grasshoppers, droughts, and tornadoes; and this land of booms and busts would be alternately praised as garden and maligned as desert. John Ise's Sod and Stubble, also a text in this course, was written in 1936 but set in nineteenth-century Central Kansas. In it, one character summarizes the Kansas he knows: "When we have rain and crops, we don't want to go, and when there ain't no crops we're too poor to go; so I reckon we'll just stay here till we starve to death."
The Kansas literature of settlement continues the contrasts of the Kansas landscape, though in terms of characters—human beings struggling and sometimes triumphing—in the nineteenth century. In so many of these novels, short stories, and poems, Kansas is WHAT people struggle against, what they attempt to survive. To some writers, the struggle of Kansas is worth it. Here's part of a poem, "The Rain," published in 1886 by Celeste May.
With thankful hearts and steady hand,
People began to improve their homes;
Determined again to reclaim the land
From the wild herd which upon it roams.
Cottages neat, and pastures wide,
Flowering gardens and stone walls grand,
Young orchards and fields on every side,
Pictures of comfort and thrift, now stand.
To other writers, the struggle was not worth it, for it takes dullness and a slavery to the land to finally survive. This from a 1927 poem "A Song for the Prairies" by Lawrence poet Allen Crafton, for whom the Crafton-Pryor Theatre in Murphy Hall on the KU campus is named:
Men of the plains hear the dull rain falling;
Men of the plains hear the lone dog's cry;
Listening close for their old dreams calling,
Building their days 'neath a sepulchre sky.
Once Kansas is settled, writers move away from the saga of pioneering and begin to examine the quality of life on the farm and in the small town. In this twentieth-century literature, spiritual life is explored. Some writers found the close community and peaceful farms to celebrate, as William Stafford does in the poem "One Home": "Mine was a Midwestern home—you can keep your world." Other Kansans found the spiritual and community life of Kansas wanting. This passage from Joseph Stanley Pennell's The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters is characteristic:
But what sort of people squatted in Fork City anyway? They all sold each other wheat and bacon and corn and beef and farm machinery and squeaky shoes; they all talked in the same Goddamned flat, nasal voice about the same Goddamned trivial things day-in-day-out year-after-year—eating sleeping and growing more rustic and pompous and proverbial (as if the secrets of Life with a capital L were to be found in the saws mouthed over a corner rail or a gutter: You kin ketch more flies with molasses than you kin with vinegar. Where there's that much smoke, there must be some far. First ketch your rabbit. Time is money.) They begat their kind, hating each other because of the no-privacy of the place, stunned because of the dullness of the virtues they felt obliged to wear, beckoned at and tempted by the rich vices that each kept each from enjoying except in deep, painful secret.
Fork City, of course, is Junction City, where Pennell was born in 1904. For writers like Pennell, Kansas is not a physical desert to be settled, but a cultural desert to be transcended. The pioneers of the twentieth-century Kansas small town are young free thinkers, young blacks overcoming prejudice to get an education and leave the state, anyone else who can dream beyond the limits of the small town. In fact, escape from the state is the most common theme of twentieth-century Kansas literature.
Kansas' reputation as "Bleeding Kansas" and as "Free Kansas" made it the destination point for the first big migration of African-Americans out of the South upon the failure of Reconstruction. Ironically, in both our literature and in our history, Kansas in reality was not "garden" of freedom, but "desert" of difficulty for many people who were racially, ethnically or culturally different from the predominant Germanic/European peoples who first settled the state. Young blacks—particularly the characters of Langston Hughes, Gordon Parks and Maxine Clair—get a solid foundation, a good (if difficult to experience) education, but then leave Kansas for the better opportunities afforded them elsewhere.
These are not the only characters who felt betrayed by the promise of Kansas. Free thinkers, racial minorities, and dreamers of the spirit were not the only ones in Kansas to rankle against restrictions and lack of opportunities. Even the farmers of Kansas once rose up against the powers that be, and started the only viable third party movement in the history of the United States. They created Populism.
One of our literary texts, The Wizard of Oz, can actually be interpreted in terms of Populism. After all, L. Frank Baum, having traveled in Kansas only once, and then only for a two-day stand at the Bowersock Opera House (now Liberty Hall) in Lawrence, needed more than that to set his great work in our state. Surely, Kansas was prominent in the national consciousness. Baum picked it, no doubt, because people would recognize it, as they had all through the latter nineteenth century, for its Civil War connections; for its place in the rapid expansion into the West after the Civil War; for its place in the saga of cowboys, cavalry, and Indians; for its early experiments with Prohibition. But in 1954, a New York high school English teacher, Henry Littlefield, gave us another reason. He saw The Wizard of Oz as a political allegory of Populism. His essay is an assigned e-reserve reading for Lesson 1. Kansas was famous for Populism until the Republicans co-opted the radical reforms in the great Progressive Republican movement of the 1910s and '20s, which was led, at least in print, by William Allen White, the Sage of Emporia.
Top of Page | Bottom of PageRecent Kansas writers are celebrating the landscape once again and roving over the entire range of all the early themes, whether it's cattle drives, territorial skirmishing, the joys and rebellions in the Kansas small town. Kansas is being seen fresh. As Lawrence poet and KU faculty member Ken Irby wrote in "The Grasslands of North America":
That same country as entered
the first time it was ever seen
is entered again and again
each time I come to it
as I came here at three
out of Texas
was the New World
So, anybody can experience the great strength of the land, a land still not wholly conquered or tamed by a materialistic culture of ordered farms and restrictive small towns. The land begins Kansas literature, and the current trend is a return to the land—its flatness called "level," its huge spaces celebrated as mind expanding, its slowly undulating landscape suddenly not monotonous but subtle.
Kansas as garden, Kansas a desert; Kansas as a free state, Kansas as a state which enslaves those tied to the land by work; Kansas as anti-slavery, Kansas as "southern" in its prejudices; Kansas as small-minded or Kansas as mind-expanding; Kansas as restrictive small town, Kansas as a land of close community. There is huge diversity of image and thought, but there is also unity. Paul Wellman, from Southwest Kansas, again:
The people of Kansas themselves are no more homogeneous than the terrain in which they live. The variegated habit of mind of Kansans on any subject whatsoever is a matter of amazement and sometimes amusement to others. Yet the appearance of divergency is more apparent than real. In the essentials which really count, Kansas is a highly competent unit. Perhaps the underlying reason for this is best expressed in the state motto: 'Ad Astra per Aspera.' Freely translated, that could be rendered: 'To the stars the hard way.'
Wellman is, I think, correct. What unifies the state and its literature is that all writers agree, finally, that Kansans have suffered unique difficulties. They have made something to be celebrated and questioned. Kansas literature helps the state to explore itself, and it can help people understand the issues most basic to Kansas and Kansans. Closely examined, these issues tell us who we are. Kansas is a physical environment, obviously, but it is a human environment, too. Exploring that human environment should be a vital part of Kansan's education.
Beyond that, Kansas literature is full of enduring work. You will be required to study these books as literature, and to think about them critically, as you would the works in any literature course. Each genre requires something special from the reader, in approach and analysis, and this course should help you learn ways to approach and analyze what you read.
I have set up the course in two units. The first includes books that, for the most part, take place in rural, nineteenth-century Kansas. They are novels and poems of pioneering and town-building. They are also stories of how human relationships are affected by poverty, greed, materialism, and the harsh conditions of pioneer life. In this first unit you will directly confront the Kansas landscape—both geography and weather—and see its effects on characters' lives. The second unit consists of novels, plays, poems, and short stories reflecting the variety of Kansas life in the twentieth century. The poems show how contemporary Kansans are reacting to the Kansas landscape. The plays, by William Inge, capture the mood of the small town. The novel by Langston Hughes is the story of a black boy confronting small-town Kansas racial prejudice and determining to make something of his life. A story collection by Maxine Clair updates the same thing to the 1950s. The other novel is set in both eastern and western Kansas, linking them through an improbable 1976 cattle drive from Hays to the Kansas City stockyards.