The Great Plains have long been fertile ground for literature. The Nature of the Place is a comprehensive study of novels and stories by writers of that region. Drawing upon studies by cultural geographers, historians, and literary critics, Diane Dufva Quantic creates an expansive portrait of the region, its history, and its literature.

Quantic offers insightful readings of a staggering array of authors, including Willa Cather, Wright Morris, Mari Sandoz, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Frederick Manfred, Wallace Stegner, and Bess Streeter Aldrich. She considers the literature of the Plains and neighboring regions from early representations in such works as James Fenimore Cooper's The Prairie, published in 1827, through such contemporary authors as Douglas Unger and Ron Hansen.

For all its concentration upon individual writers and works, however, The Nature of the Place is marked by Quantic's sustained attention to the region's collective social and cultural history.

Central to that cumulative focus is the constant, immensely fruitful clash between the myths of the Great Plains - myths represented by such phrases as the Garden of the World, the Great American Desert, the Closed Frontier, Manifest Destiny, and the Safety Valve - and the infinitely more complex history of the region. Quantic is always aware of how that clash, while most productive of literature, has made a final, definitive vision of the Great Plains impossible.

In so vast and changeable a region it is only fitting that, as Wright Morris once remarked, "Many things would come to pass, but the nature of the place would remain a matter of opinion."