The Adventures of The Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart (Women in the West)

The Adventures of The Woman Homesteader: The Life and Letters of Elinore Pruitt Stewart (Women in the West) by Bloomfield, Susanne George. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780803221413.

Generations of readers have delighted in Elinore Pruitt Stewarts Letters of a Woman Homesteader (1914) and Letters on an Elk Hunt (1915), among the most engaging accounts of life in the American West. Stewart related her adventures on an isolated Wyoming homestead with such vividness, gusto, and sympathy that she has become the woman homesteader. Until now, however, little has been known about her except what she chose to reveal in her published letters. Old friends and new acquaintances alike will welcome this book combining Stewarts previously unpublished or uncollected letters with Susanne K. Georges extensive research. Here is as full and candid a portrait as wella re ever likely to have of The Woman Homesteader: the illness, disappointments, and grinding hard work that lay behind her genial public persona; the family, neighbors, and correspondents who peopled her letter-stories and shared her life. George has discovered in Elinore Pruitt Stewart a story fully as rewarding as any told by the Woman Homesteader herself. In an afterword George considers Stewarts use of fictional devices and her growth as a writer as well as her place in American letters.