Gertrude Atherton's ambition to be a writer was fulfilled in the turbulent 1890s, the decade in which she fashioned the theme of the American West as a significant part of an evolving western European civilization. She would elaborate this theme in short stories, romances, and novels through the first half of the twentieth century. From 1889 to 1900 she lived and wrote in Paris and London as well as in her native San Francisco, and her writing was shaped by disparate influences: the idealism and style of Walter Pater, the fin de siècle decadence associated with the figure of the New Woman, the boredom of leisured women and men, and the restless, unruly history of California and San Francisco following the settled life of the Spanish-Californian haciendas of the 1840s. Searching for her literary voice as a westerner while seeking the recognition of the eastern establishment of publishers...