To some, it may come as a surprise that Mother Jones was a woman before she was a magazine, just as to many it has come as a surprise lately that something besides World War I happened between 1900 and 1920…. But Mary Lee Settle hasn't forgotten. The Scapegoat … remembers those years and people superbly. And if, as it appears, there is a renascence of interest in that perhaps deliberately forgotten "golden age" of native radicalism in America, The Scapegoat's timing...

Readers and writers who mourn fiction's loss of subject would do well to catch up on Mary Lee Settle. I say catch up because this vigorous writer has since 1954 published eight novels that gobble up time and geography and make their way through the bloodlines of family dynasties, rendering the world from 17th-century England to 20th-century Turkey. And though she has had her champions …, she has experienced the peculiar lack of recognition sometimes suffered by strong-willed writers no matter ...

Eventually enough characters to provide a proper denouement [to O Beulah Land] converge on an exceptionally beautiful valley beyond the Endless Mountains. Beulah … is the promised land; and in this setting Miss Settle collects all the budding American stereotypes. Everyone is quite vigorous; the differences are chiefly of intent. Perhaps the most important character is Jeremiah, an escaped bondsman from the colonies who finds amazing spiritual and physical freedom in the Virginia wilderness. He is th...