The Bower Atmosphere: A Biography of B. M. Bower

by Victoria Lamont

"Reconstructing Bower's daily life as it is documented in her diaries, letters, and family papers, this biography claims Bertha Muzzy Bower as a a woman, writer, and western maverick whose daily life proved as dramatic as her fiction"--

216 pages, Paperback

Published March 1, 2024

Reviews

[Elisabeth]

3.5 stars. I believe this is the first full biography written of B.M. (Bertha Muzzy) Bower, one of my earliest favorite Western writers, and it was nice to finally fill in the gaps of the basic facts I knew about her life. A sad life in some respects, with all the unsuccessful relationships in her family (three marriages apiece for Bower and for each of her three youngest children), and her apparent lack of wisdom in money management, but still interesting for the reader of her fiction—what I appreciated most was being able to place her novels on the timeline of her life and see how the places she was living and the subjects that interested her at the time (e.g. aviation, mining, filmmaking) found their way into her stories. (Some of the odder passages in Hay-Wire, a favorite novel, make much more sense knowing she was a Christian Scientist for a good chunk of her adult life.)

Lamont is fair and even-handed in handling her subject, acknowledging where gaps in records and conflicting family anecdotes make it impossible to state some things as facts or assign blame. On the other hand, the book also shows the signs of its times in the use of contemporary buzzwords and a sense of anxiousness to placate the prejudices of modern readers. Lamont somehow finds it necessary to tell us the full tribal name and history of oppression of every American Indian tribe who once lived in places Bower lived or visited…but on the other hand says next to nothing about the McNamara and Marlow cattle ranch where she lived while gathering the inspiration for and writing her most beloved books—not how many acres they owned, how many head of cattle they ran, who McNamara and Marlow themselves were, nothing. I have read biographies that try to cram in too much detail peripheral to the subject, but considering the influence that the Montana ranching country had on Bower’s work, this kind of background detail seems like it would be relevant.

[Michelle Kidwell]

The Bower Atmosphere
A Biography of B. M. Bower
by Victoria Lamont
Pub Date01 Mar 2024
University of Nebraska Press |Bison Books
Biographies & Memoirs| Nonfiction \(Adult\)


Netgalley and University of Nebraska Press/Bison Books have provided me with a copy of The Bower Atmosphere to review:


B.M. Bower was the first author to make a living writing Westerns. During the course of her literary career, Bertha Muzzy Bower published over sixty novels and hundreds of short stories. Her westerns were among the first adapted to film, and the exploits of her cowboys at the fictional Flying U ranch established a tradition that continues today. She began writing short stories in 1900, desperate for money so that she could end her unhappy marriage to a cowboy who worked for the McNamara ranch.


The Bower Atmosphere, a story of Bower's remarkable life, is based on research in Bower's personal archives and publishers' records, as well as interviews with some of her descendants. She began on a Montana cattle ranch and went on to write serial westerns, dealing with the conflicting demands of editors, husbands, children, and her own creative ambitions while battling the conflicting pressures of her editor, husband, and children.


I give The Bower Atmosphere five out of five stars!


Happy Reading!

[Vicky]

I was not familiar with BM Bower even though I have lived in Montana for almost 35 years. She was a contemporary and neighbor of Charlie Russell and his wife Nancy in Great Falls, and he illustrated several of her books. The title is important because she brought a feminine sensibility and reality to the Cowboy/ Western genre. I have read many of the Chip of the Flying U series, for which she was best known, and she gets the “atmosphere”— dialogue, character and description of place —exactly right. She herself lived a ranch life near Big Sandy, MT with all the poverty and hardships that entailed and yet she succeeded in the male world of Western writers. She was a remarkable woman and Lamont has done a her justice in this very interesting, thoughtful biography.