A short life of the author
Jessamyn West (18 July 1902 – 23 February 1984) was an American novelist and short story writer whose work, deeply rooted in the Quaker tradition and the landscape of rural Indiana, achieved both critical acclaim and popular success — most notably with The Friendly Persuasion (1945), a collection of warmly humorous stories about a Quaker family’s struggles with conscience, community, and the temptations of the world during the American Civil War. She was a first cousin of Richard Nixon, a fact she found awkward and occasionally amusing.
Early Life and the Quaker Background
West was born Mary Jessamyn West in Vernon, Indiana, to a family of devout Quakers. The family moved to Yorba Linda, California, when she was six (the Wests and the Nixons, both Quaker families, were neighbours there). She attended Whittier College — where she edited the campus newspaper and met her future husband, Harry Maxwell McPherson — and did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley.
In 1931, she was diagnosed with advanced tuberculosis and spent two years in a sanatorium, expected to die. Her mother, Grace Anna Milhous West, nursed her through the illness, telling stories of the family’s Quaker ancestors in Indiana to pass the long hours of convalescence. These stories became the raw material for The Friendly Persuasion.
The Friendly Persuasion (1945)
West’s best-known book is a collection of interconnected stories about Jess and Eliza Birdwell, a Quaker couple on a farm in southern Indiana during the 1860s. Jess is a nurseryman with a love of horse racing, music, and worldly pleasures that sits uneasily with Quaker plainness. Eliza is a Quaker minister of stern principle and tender heart. The stories trace the tensions between conscience and desire, between the Quaker testimony of peace and the pressures of the Civil War, and between individual temperament and communal expectation.
The prose is deceptively simple — West’s sentences have the clean plainness of Quaker speech — but the characterisation is subtle and the humour is genuinely funny. The book was a critical and commercial success, and William Wyler’s 1956 film adaptation, starring Gary Cooper and Dorothy McGuire, introduced the Birdwell family to millions of viewers.
Except for Me and Thee (1969) is a companion volume that continues the Birdwell story, following Jess and Eliza from their courtship through the Underground Railroad and the Civil War.
Cress Delahanty (1953)
West’s other widely read book is a collection of stories about a teenage girl growing up in a California orange-growing community in the 1940s. The stories follow Cress from age twelve to sixteen, tracing her encounters with love, death, social pressure, and the bewilderments of adolescence with quiet psychological acuity. The book is a minor classic of coming-of-age fiction, less well known than it deserves to be.
The Massacre at Fall Creek (1975)
West’s most ambitious novel is based on the true story of the 1824 Fall Creek massacre, in which white settlers in Indiana murdered nine Seneca Indians — and, unprecedentedly, were tried and convicted of murder. The novel examines the event from multiple perspectives, including those of the settlers, the Native Americans, and the lawyers, and raises difficult questions about justice, racism, and the meaning of the frontier.
Other Works
South of the Angels (1960) is a novel about a Southern California housing development in the 1910s — a sprawling social novel that captures the boom-and-bust culture of California real estate. Leafy Rivers (1967) is a historical novel about a woman’s journey down the Ohio River in the early nineteenth century. The Woman Said Yes (1976) is a memoir about West’s mother and her sister Carmen, who died of cancer — a remarkably candid book about illness, death, and the decision to end one’s own life.
Writing and Method
West was a disciplined, deliberate writer who published steadily for four decades. Her prose style is distinctive: spare, rhythmically precise, with a Quaker plainness that conceals considerable artistry. She distrusted verbal flamboyance and preferred to build her effects through accumulation of observed detail. Her best work has the quality that distinguishes serious regional fiction from local colour: it uses the particular — Indiana Quakers, California orange groves — to reach the universal.
Critical Standing
West was well-regarded during her lifetime — The Friendly Persuasion was widely praised, and she received several honorary degrees and literary awards — but her reputation has faded since her death. She belongs to a generation of mid-century American women writers (along with Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and Katherine Anne Porter) whose work deserves more attention than it currently receives. Her fiction lacks the Gothic intensity of O’Connor or the structural sophistication of Porter, but it possesses a warmth and moral clarity that are genuinely rare.
Collecting West
The Friendly Persuasion (1945, Harcourt, Brace) in first edition with dust jacket brings $75–$200. Cress Delahanty (1953) and The Massacre at Fall Creek (1975) are affordable. West is not widely collected, making her first editions good value for readers who appreciate mid-century American fiction.