Biography & Autobiography Literary
The Bower Atmosphere
A Biography of B. M. Bower
- Publisher
- Bison Books
- Initial publish date
- Mar 2024
- Category
- Literary, Women
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781496236210
- Publish Date
- Mar 2024
- List Price
- $33.95
Classroom Resources
Where to buy it
Description
B. M. (Bertha Muzzy) Bower was the first author to make a living writing popular westerns, creating more than sixty novels and hundreds of short stories that were read by millions of Americans. Bower’s were among the first westerns adapted to film, and the exploits of her cowboys at the fictional Flying U ranch established a tradition that flourishes to this day. A Montana mother of three, she began writing short stories in 1900, desperate for money that would allow her to leave her unhappy marriage to a cowboy employed by the McNamara ranch.
Discouraged by her editors from publicizing her identity as a woman, Bower’s important contribution to American mass culture faded from cultural memory after her death in 1940. Based on extensive research in Bower’s personal archives and publishers’ records, as well as interviews with some of her descendants, The Bower Atmosphere recounts the remarkable twists and turns of Bower’s life, from her beginnings on a Montana cattle ranch to her success as a writer of serial westerns, all the while contending with the conflicting pressures of editors, husbands, children, and her own creative aspirations.
About the author
Contributor Notes
Victoria Lamont is a professor of English at the University of Waterloo. She is the author of Westerns: A Women’s History (Nebraska, 2016) and coauthor of Judith Merril: A Critical Study.
Excerpt: The Bower Atmosphere: A Biography of B. M. Bower (by (author) Victoria Lamont)
1
An Unbearable Servitude
Bertha Muzzy Bower was living in close quarters in a tiny cabin in a
hayfield near Big Sandy, Montana, when she made her first serious foray
as a professional writer. It was the winter of 1900, and Bertha shared
the drafty, three-room cabin with her husband and three children.
Her husband, Clayton, had been hired to feed calves for the winter for
the McNamara and Marlow cattle company, among the largest cattle
operations in Montana. In exchange for forking hay to five hundred
calves twice a day during the harsh Montana winter, Clayton received
a wage and use of the small cabin on the tl ranch, part of McNamara
and Marlow’s extensive holdings in the state. Deeply resentful of her
dependency on Clayton, and having from a young age nursed ambitions
to become a writer, Bertha saved enough money to buy a typewriter,
paper, and other supplies she would need to embark on a career as a
professional writer. On December 15, 1900, she made the trek to town
to post her first submission, a short story called “The Backsliding of
Sister Stewart,” to McClure’s Magazine.
It was an opportune time for budding writers, especially from the
West, because of a perfect storm of technological and social transfor-
mations that had been unfolding since the end of the Civil War. Print
technologies made it possible to mass-produce magazines using cheap
“pulp” paper, which could be widely distributed thanks to the expan-
sion of the national railroad system. These same railroads brought
millions of Americans to the big cities in search of factory work—
another product of the technological boom. As American life became
more urban and mechanized, readers craved stories about adventure
and open space. So magazine editors, scrambling for quality content
to fill their publications, looked West. Taking advantage of these con-
ditions, a Montana housewife named Bertha Muzzy Bower became
B. M. Bower, one of America’s earliest and most important authors of
that most macho of genres: the western.
Editorial Reviews
“Meticulously researched, eminently readable. . . . Lamont traces a remarkable tale of Bower’s persistent creativity and remarkably varied contributions to early twentieth-century mass culture.”—Mary Chapman, author of Making Noise, Making News: Suffrage Print Culture and U.S. Modernism
“This excellent volume . . . dramatically reframes the literary history of the western, confirming Bower’s foundational but heretofore unacknowledged role in establishing the genre; the western, Lamont proves, was never the sole province of male authors, its most genuine plots crafted by a woman whose gender was too long obscured.”—Jennifer S. Tuttle, coeditor of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts
“Victoria Lamont’s compelling biography—packed with verve, deep archival research, and the everyday dramas of B. M. Bower’s writing life—changes the story not only on one fascinating woman and her work but on larger assumptions, legacies, and lineages of western women writers.”—Christine Bold, author of The Frontier Club