In contrast to the close attention accorded its train and car counterparts, the bus is a neglected site of cultural interpretation in American studies. "John Steinbeck's Sweetheart: The Cosmic American Bus" opens a long overdue discussion about the "meanings" of the bus in American culture. It also offers a new perspective on an overlooked novel, The Wayward Bus. Focusing on issues of gender, race, and class, the essay examines Steinbeck's representation of buses and bus travel in The Wayward Bus and situates it among other bus portrayals. Although often only fleetingly, buses perpetually appear in American literature, music, and film, associated with urban and rural extremes; minutely mapped city spaces and unknowably vast (often western) open ones; working-class transformation and middle-class disorientation. Signifying a nation huge in size but local in character, the bus is a class-loaded symbol of America that at once evokes the mundane and the extraordinary.
At the same time that the genteelly raised Pauline Johnson explored mixed-blood identity in wide-ranging performance tours of Canada and Europe, the less privileged writer Mourning Dove, in her novel Cogewea, The Half-Blood, did the same more locally from the inland Northwest. A member of the first generation of Colvilles to be raised on a reservation, Mourning Dove had determined to write a book "for her people, for herself, and for the Euro-Americans who understood so little about those they had conquered."' She completed the first draft of Cogewea in 1914.2 Set on a ranch in the frontier of turnof-the-century Montana-a site of contestation between Native Americans, ranchers, and homesteaders-the novel tells the tale of its half-white, half-Okanogan heroine Cogewea, wooed for her money by the white easterner Densmore. Now best known as the first female Native American novelist, with the publication of Cogewea in 1927. Mourning Dove "announced explicitly what was to become the dominant theme in novels by Indian authors: the dilemma of the mixed Cathryn Halverson has just completed her dissertation for the University of Michigan-"Autobiography, Genius, and the American West: The Stories of Mary MacLane and Opal Whiteley."
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.