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Ann Ronald found a career and a home when she moved to Reno to teach at the University of Nevada. There, she undertook the study of the literature of the West and discovered that the region's vast open spaces satisfied her zest for the outdoors. The essays collected in Reader of the Purple Sage reflect Ronald's wide-ranging interests. Here are highly informative, and deeply informed, critical essays on writers as diverse as Zane Grey, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Terry Tempest Williams, as well as the Tonopah Ladies - a group of literary women who found their voices in the unlikely setting of a mining boomtown - and on such varied topics as the image of Reno in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. Included are several recent essays in which Ronald thoughtfully discusses the burgeoning field of environmental writing, some of its principal themes and concerns, and its best-known practitioners. Individually, these essays have made a significant contribution to literary scholarship. As an ensemble, they offer a remarkably perceptive, knowing, and sensitive discussion of the Iiterary West, its widely various voices and multifarious concerns, its beauty, ironies, and wisdom.