Selected Writings of Bernard DeVoto

The Year of Decision: 1846 (1943), excerpts

• from Chapter I, "Build Thee More Stately Mansions"
• from Chapter II, "The Mountain Man"

The Hour (1951), excerpt

• from Chapter 1, "The American Spirits"

Easy Chair articles, from Harper's Magazine

• Preface to The Easy Chair collection, and "Number 241", November 1955
• "The Third Floor," March 1952
  The old Cambridge house as a symbol of social improvement.
• "Due Notice to the FBI," October 1949
  "I will not discuss anyone in private with any government investigator."
• "Hell's Half Acre, Mass", September 1955
  A specimen of nature, semi-wild, within the Cambridge city limits.

Other articles

• "The Life of Jonathan Dyer" ("Jonathan Dyer, Frontiersman"), Harper's, September 1933
  BDeV's memoir of his Mormon grandfather.
• "New England: There She Stands," Harper's, March 1932
  "New England is a finished place."
• "The Ex-Communists," Atlantic Monthly, November 1950
  "...they have recanted ideas which only fools would ever have accepted."
• "The West Against Itself," Harper's, January 1947
  The landgrab: America's public lands under assault by private interests.
• "The Centennial of Mormonism," expanded version, from Forays and Rebuttals, 1936
  The Mormon Church in legend, doctrine, and 20th-century success.
• "Yankee Grand Tour," New England Journeys of Ford Times, no. 2, 1954
  What to see in New England, traveling by car.
• "Homily for a Troubled Time," Woman's Day, January 1951
  Man must face the atomic age, not flee from it.
• "Utah," American Mercury, March 1926
  The petty philistinisms of the society BDeV left behind.
• "God -- Litterateur," The Guardian, March 1925
  Analysis of The Doctrine and Covenants of the Mormon Church.
• "Ogden: The Underwriters of Salvation," from The Taming of the Frontier, 1925
  How the Mormon Church established and dominated Utah.

Letters

• to Robert S. Forsythe, 6 October 1927
• to Mr. Warren, 10 December 1943
• to Jarvis Thurston, 24 May 1943
• to Raleigh Blake, 1929 (?)
• to Van Wyck Brooks, 2 August 1943
• to Willard H. Pedrick, 11 December 1952
• to Philip Graham, 22 December 1952
• to Mrs. Guilhert, 31 October 1949
• to Mr. Chambers, 22 May 1950
• to Mr. Oberholtzer, 4 April 1950
• to Mr. Foraker, 5 July 1949
  
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  All of the articles, letters and excerpts in this collection are protected by copyright. For permission to reprint any of these writings, please write to Mark DeVoto at mdevoto@granite.tufts.edu.