the same time, the region has a distinct cultural inheritance,
full of life and drama, told variously in books so numerous
that their very existence would surprise many people who
depend on the Book-of-the-Month Club for literary guidance.
Any people have a right to their own cultural inheritance,
though sheeplike makers of textbooks and sheeplike
pedagogues of American literature have until recently, either
wilfully or ignorantly, denied that right to the Southwest.
Tens of thousands of students of the Southwest have been
assigned endless pages on and listened to dronings over Cotton
Mather, Increase Mather, Jonathan Edwards, Anne Bradstreet,
and other dreary creatures of colonial New England
who are utterly foreign to the genius of the Southwest. If
nothing in written form pertaining to the Southwest existed
at all, it would be more profitable for an inhabitant to go
out and listen to coyotes singing at night in the prickly pear
than to tolerate the Increase Mather kind of thing. It is very
profitable to listen to coyotes anyhow. I rebelled years ago
at having the tradition, the spirit, the meaning of the soil to
which I belong utterly disregarded by interpreters of literature
and at the same time having the Increase Mather kind
of stuff taught as if it were important to our part of America.
Happily the disregard is disappearing, and so is Increase
Mather.

If they had to be rigorously classified into hard and fast
categories, comparatively few of the books in the lists that
follow would be rated as pure literature. Fewer would be
rated as history. A majority of them are the stuff of history.
The stuff out of which history is made is generally more vital