ABSTRACT
When Laura Adams Armer’s first novel, Waterless Mountain, was published in 1931, it proved remarkably successful despite its fifty-seven-yearold author’s complete lack of experience as an author for children or as an author of fiction. In order to get into print, it had won the Longmans Green competition for children’s literature, whose principal reward was a book contract for the manuscript. It was then selected by the Junior Literary Guild, a children’s book club founded in 1929, to be sent to all subscribers aged nine to eleven; the fact of selection carried with it the assurance that the book would be stocked by a large number of libraries, many of which had a standing order for all Guild titles. Armer’s novel capped an impressive year by going on to receive the Newbery Medal, besting works that included Rachel Field’s Calico Bush (one of the runners-up), Eleanor Lattimore’s Little Pear and Albert Payson Terhune’s A Dog Named Chips. As Kenneth Kidd points out, Newbery winners enjoy increased sales and a considerably extended shelf life (Kidd 2007: 168); while Waterless Mountain is not well known today, it remains in print and has also been translated into Chinese, Japanese and Dutch. This chapter explores how Armer’s work could become immediately canonical despite some awkwardness of reception and placement. I argue that the success of Waterless Mountain resides not only in its intrinsic qualities as a work of children’s literature but also in its position as a certain kind of modernist text and its role in complex aesthetic and political debates about the status of Native American culture. The latter qualities, I suggest, made the novel appealing to adult tastemakers at the time of publication, but the very timeliness of the text simultaneously meant that its canonicity would be of limited duration.
