Nancy Bunge

This book tells the uncommon story of a missionary family in the Midwestern United States, and their interactions with the indigenous Ojibwe. When Leonard and Harriet Wheeler arrived at La Pointe, Wisconsin in July of 1841, hoping to help the Ojibwe understand and accept the value of Christian civility, they did not expect such a profound transformation of their own lives. The Wheelers' empathy for the Ojibwe not only grew during their twenty-five years of mission work in Northern Wisconsin, much of it spent trying to protect the Ojibwe from predatory whites, it also influenced the lives of their children.

ST. PAUL PIONEER PRESS
"Reading a collection of letters can be a dicey experience, depending on how good a writer the person is and how carefully the editor fills in the gaps. 'Woman in the Wilderness' earns an A-plus on both counts."

RELIGION IN AMERICAN HISTORY
"Here's a very nice primary source book for your collection or for your university library, that adds much to the literature on nineteenth-century missionaries, especially female missionaries and white-Native interactions."

MINNESOTA HISTORY
"Letters among Harriet, her husband, family, and friends vividly portray the rigors of missionary life, the female sphere in which Harriet operated, the couple's different temperaments, and their efforts to aid the Ojibwe threatened with removal from their land."

MIDWEST BOOK REVIEW

“5.0 out of 5 stars. An absorbing primary testimony of daily life in America well over a century ago. Highly recommended.”

With Huckleberry Finn, American fiction changed radically and shifted its setting to the middle of the country. A focus on social issues replaced the philosophic and psychological explorations that dominated the work of Melville and Hawthorne. Colloquial speech rather than elevated language articulated these fresh ideas, while common folk rather than dramatic characters like Ahab and Hester Prynne played central roles.

This transformation of American literature has been largely ignored, while during the 130 years since Huckleberry Finn the Midwest has continued to produce writers whose work, like Twain’s, addresses injustice by portraying the decency of ordinary people. Since the end of the 19th century, Midwestern authors have dismissed the elite and celebrated those whom the power structure typically excludes: children, women, African-Americans and the lower classes. Instead of wealth and power, this literature values authenticity and compassion. The book explores this literary tradition by examining the work of 30 Midwestern writers including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Willa Cather, Ernest Hemingway, Richard Wright, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Franzen, Jane Smiley and Louise Erdrich.

THE MIDDLE WEST REVIEW
"Bunge's conception of the region .....is given academic standing as a firm cultural baseline opening a fresh way of reading and valuing the region's fiction"

MIDAMERICA
Offers insights "into key Midwestern works and the ways in which they oppose the capitalist ethos and endorse a more humanistic one.,"

LAN SAMANTHA CHANG, director, Iowa Writers' Workshop
"I found Nancy Bunge's interviews fresh, fascinating, and useful to me as a writer and teacher."

JANET BURROWAY, author of WRITING FICTION
"MASTER CLASS is many lessons in one…I'll want it handy on my shelf."

FOREWORD MAGAZINE
Bunge…has brought together a briskly told set of home truths about writing."

THE WRITER MAGAZINE
"A treasure trove of writerly advice."