The Steiner Papers include the personal and professional papers of Stan Steiner covering the time period from 1940 -1987 and occupy 69 linear feet. They document the personal and intellectual activities of a writer, a social historian, a moralist, a folklorist, an anecdotalist, and a myth-teller. His writings-some twenty books and countless articles-are a continuing search for vanishing cultures and the histories of forgotten people, specifically of the American West. To that end, Steiner wrote about Native Americans, the Chinese who helped build the West, Mexican Americans, New Mexico and New Mexicans, ranchers, farmers, cowboys, and Islanders. His goal was to disabuse his readers of stereotypes and misinformed images of the West by telling the complicated, nuanced, and elemental stories of these people in their own words, what Steiner called "testimonials." His manuscripts provide multiple draft copies of many of these testimonies as well as typed manuscripts and photostats of typed drafts and published works by Steiner.

Stan Steiner was born on January 1, 1925, son of Bernard and Regina Storch Steiner of Brooklyn. After attending the University of Wisconsin for a year, Steiner hitchhiked West from New York in 1945 and began a forty year love affair with the people and places of the American West. The center of his personal and working life until his death was the reevaluation of the history of the West from a Western perspective. This took the form of his many books, from his earliest The Last Horse (1961) to the posthumous publication, edited by Emily Skretny Drabanski, of The Waning of the West (1989).Along the way, Steiner's wrote several seminal works, among them The New Indians (1968), La Raza : The Mexican Americans (1969), The Tiguas : Lost Tribe of City Indians (1972), The Islands : The World of the Puerto Ricans (1974), The Vanishing White Man (1976), Fusang : The Chinese who Built America (1979), Spirit Woman : The Diaries of Bonita Wa Wa Calachaw Nunez (editor, 1980), The Ranchers (1980, rev. 1985), and Dark and Dashing Horsemen (1981).

69.0 Linear feet

Property rights reside with the repository. Literary rights reside with the creators of the documents or their heirs. To obtain permission to publish or reproduce, please contact the Public Services Librarian of the Dept. of Special Collections.

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