Davis Country
Glen A. Love, Brian Booth, and H. L. Davis
Davis Country collects the best writings of H. L. Davis, one of the Northwest's premier authors and the only Oregonian to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Born in southern Oregon's Umpqua Valley in 1894, Davis grew up in Antelope and The Dalles. He began as a poet, receiving the prestigious Levinson Prize at age twenty-five. With the encouragement of H. L. Mencken, he turned to fiction, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 1935 novel Honey in the Horn, which Mencken called the best first novel ever published in America.
Full of humor and humanity, Davis's work displays a vast knowledge of Pacific Northwest history, lore, and landscape. His instinctive feel for the Northwest – the weather, trees, plants, animals, the varieties of Oregon rain, the smell of forest winds and high-desert heat – is unmatched.
This volume gathers many of Davis's finest stories, essays, poems, and letters, as well as excerpts from his most famous novels. An introduction by editors Brian Booth and Glen Love, a brief autobiography, and an afterword on Davis's final, unfinished novel provide for a better understanding of this truly original Northwest voice.
Of related interest: Wildmen, Wobblies, & Whistle Punks: Stewart Holbrook's Lowbrow Northwest and Fishing the Northwest: An Angler's Reader
About the author
Glen A. Love is a Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Oregon. He is the author and editor of several books on the literature and culture of the Pacific Northwest. Among his books is New Americans: The Westerner and the Modern Experience in the American Novel (1982) and Northwest Perspectives (1979), a book of essays which he co-edited with Edwin R. Bingham. He lives in Eugene, Oregon.
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Like H. L. Davis, Brian Booth was a native of Douglas County, Oregon. He was the founder of the Oregon Institute of Literary Arts (now Literary Arts) and the editor of Wildmen, Wobblies, and Whistle Punks: Stewart Holbrook’s Lowbrow Northwest as well as co-editor of Davis Country. He practiced law in Portland, Oregon.
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H.L. DAVIS was a truly original Northwest voice. Born in southern Oregon’s Umpqua Valley in 1894, Davis grew up in Antelope and The Dalles. He began his writing career as a poet, receiving the prestigious Levinson Prize at age twenty-five. With the encouragement of H. L. Mencken—who called Honey in the Horn the best first novel ever published in America—he turned to fiction, publishing five popular novels and many short stories and essays in the course of his career.
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"As a chronicler of life in our corner of this American land, H. L. Davis was colorful (how he would have snorted at being called that), ornery (he’d have loved that), opinionated (that went without saying), and splendid in several other civically purifying ways. The Northwest misses him more than it knows."
The OSU Press mourns the loss of attorney, author, and cultural activist Brian Booth, who died of cancer at his home in Portland on March 7.