Davis Country collects the best writings of H. L. Davis, one of the Northwest's premier authors and the only Oregonian to receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Born in southern Oregon's Umpqua Valley in 1894, Davis grew up in Antelope and The Dalles. He began as a poet, receiving the prestigious Levinson Prize at age twenty-five. With the encouragement of H. L. Mencken, he turned to fiction, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his 1935 novel Honey in the Horn, which Mencken called the best first novel ever published in America. Full of humor and humanity, Davis's work displays a vast knowledge of Pacific Northwest history, lore, and landscape. His instinctive feel for the Northwest – the weather, trees, plants, animals, the varieties of Oregon rain, the smell of forest winds and high-desert heat – is unmatched. This volume gathers many of Davis's finest stories, essays, poems, and letters, as well as excerpts from his most famous novels. An introduction by editors Brian Booth and Glen Love, a brief autobiography, and an afterword on Davis's final, unfinished novel provide for a better understanding of this truly original Northwest voice.

Fiction, Manners and customs, Northwest, Pacific Social life and customs Fiction, Oregon authors, Pacific Northwest, Romans

Davis on Davis Honey in the Horn excerpt Essays and Stories Oregon Open Winter Fishing Fever Old Man Isbell's Wife Hell to Be Smart Town in Eastern Oregon Team Bells Woke Me Homestead Orchard Puget Sound Country Kettle of Fire Poems Rain-Crow Crop Campers Witches River People Steel Gang Clearing Old Stones Proud Riders New Birds Counting Back Letters Winds of Morning excerpt Afterword: Exit, Pursued by a Bear Brief H. L. Davis Bibliography