Beyond plains and prairies and last lettuce ranch, it falls- often quite literally- into the cool, complacent Pacific.

183 pages, $3.95.) The West doesn’t end at the Sierra Madre. J o hn D e W it t M c K e e, New Mexico Institute of Mining < L r Technology The Crying of Lot 49. The plot summaries and the bibliography are useful, and the final chap ter, in which Gaston evaluates Conrad Richter’s total production, and does so justly and with surprising economy, is the best part of the book. Every time he considers a new work, Gaston ties it up tightly with Richter’s philosophical ideas and with the half dozen themes which he dis cerns in Richter’s fiction and every time he does that, he recapitulates the relationship of the philosophy and the themes to the stories and novels he has already considered. But Gaston gets sidetracked by Richter’s philosophy - a curious combination of Michael Faraday and Emile Coue. In support of his Richter-Wolfe thesis, Gaston then traces several of Richter’s fictional characters through generations of Richter’s ancestry, both paternal and maternal, in a section of the book which threatens to become as monotonous as the Biblical begats. In spite of such confusion, this eighty-first volume of the TUSAS series begins, as do others in the series, quite conventionally, with a chronology and with a biographical section which bears a strong family resemblance to the authorized biographies of the nineteenth century. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:ġ42 Western American Literature he should stick to his stated theme, that Conrad Richter is perhaps the most autobiographical writer in American literature since Thomas Wolfe.

The crying of lot 49 pages