From adventurers to novelists
It would seem obvious to start the story in 1741, when the Dane Vitus Jonassen Bering, in the pay of the Russians, crossed the strait to which he left his name, or even 80 years earlier when Simon Dejnev accomplished the same feat without making a mark. This would not make us forget the indigenous peoples - notably the Aleuts - who continue to fight today to keep their culture and ancestral knowledge alive, although the colonists have not stopped oppressing them. After the Russian trappers had finished taking advantage of the resources - to the point that the sea otter, whose fur was sold at crazy prices, disappeared from certain territories - they lost interest in Alaska, which they sold to the Americans for a few million dollars in 1867. Barely fifteen years later, a French writer chose this setting for part of the plot of his novel César Cascabel. Jules Verne (1828-1905) never set foot in Alaska, and in the end travelled very little during a life in which he composed, however, with brilliance and a lively imagination, fascinating expeditions.
If these particular landscapes show themselves propitious to inspire fictions, they do not fail either to fascinate the true adventurers, who sometimes go there only equipped with tea and dry bread, but deprived of guns, as would have done the Scot John Muir. Great defender of a nature that he knew was already threatened, ahead of his time, visionary, this naturalist lived from 1838 to 1914. He became, among other things, the founder of the Sierra Club, a non-governmental organization for the protection of the environment that is still active today, which does not make him lose his reputation as the father of modern ecology. Between erudition and incredible anecdotes, his book Voyages en Alaska (Payot editions) remains a classic for those interested in these distant lands. He tells about his expedition realized in 1899, two years after a man - 38 years his junior! - had also ventured to travel through these remote regions. It is indeed on August 2, 1897 that Jack London (1876-1916) disembarked in Juneau, a stage on the way to Dawson (Canada) where he exploited a concession in the hope of discovering gold. His fever was short-lived - literature was already calling him - and took another form since scurvy did not spare him. Although he did not come back rich from this new trip - at 21 years old he already had several to his credit - he gained material that he did not fail to use in his famous novel The Call of the Forest, the story of a Californian dog, Buck, kidnapped and forcibly harnessed to a sled, and in several short stories that can be found, for example, in the collection The Love of Life (Folio editions)
Between 1900 and 1909, at least four authors were born who gave another coloring to their stories, showing an almost scientific and especially humanistic interest: Bob Marshall (1901-1939), Segundo Llorente (1906-1989), Margaret Lantis (1906-2006) and James Louis Giddings (1909-1964). Like John Muir, the first was an environmental activist who also contributed to the protection of wild lands. Guided by his passion for trees, it was his passion for the men he met in the village of Wiseman where he was staying that led him to write the great bestseller of 1933: Arctic Village. The second is a Spanish missionary whose love for Alaska led him to take on political duties. Prolix, he left an abundant work that reveals his vocation as an ethnologist, a field that will be explored in turn by the anthropologist Margaret Lantis and the archaeologist James Louis Giddings who will prove that Alaska has been inhabited for at least 4,000 years. Finally, it is with a certain melancholy that one should not fail to evoke the memory of Marie Smith Jones, born in 1918 in Cordova, who was the last speaker of the Eyak language, a heritage that she tried all her life to preserve, in particular by collaborating with The Eyak Language Project, still online on the Internet.
Openness and abundance
Alaska, which was accessible only by a single railroad at the beginning of the 20th century, was to experience significant immigration in the second half of the century, due to the exploitation of its underground resources. Officially attached to the American Union in 1959 when it became the 49th state, the territory attracted non-native writers, although it did not yet produce any. In the list of those who died there, if not born there, we could mention for example the former marine Robert Owen Bowen (1920-2003) who was a prisoner of war in the Philippines, and especially the hermit John Haines (1924-2011) who spent many years isolated in a cabin and wrote the book Twenty-Five Years of Solitude, to be obtained without further delay in French translation from Gallmeister. Sue Henry (1940-2020) successfully wrote detective stories, as well as Tom Sexton, born in 1940 in Lowell, Massachusetts, who wrote poetry, as did Richard Dauenhauer (1942-2014). Dauenhauer and his wife, Nora Marks, an Alaskan Tlingite born in 1927 in Juneau, produced a work dedicated to this ethnic group from the southeast of the state.
Little by little, the voices of Alaskan authors also began to be heard, driven by the growing literacy of which the development of the University (initially Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, from its opening to students in 1922 until 1935) is only one of the signs. One of the first representatives of women's literature was the playwright and novelist Susan Arnout Smit, who was born in 1948 in Anchorage, the most populous city in Alaska. She first made a name for herself with a historically inspired fictional play about a mixed-race couple, The Frozen Lady, and then won the Stanley Drama Award in 1990 for her play BEAST. She continued her career as an essayist and then wrote television scripts and thrillers, which established her reputation and opened up new avenues for Dana Stabenow, whose crime novels have been translated into French by Delpierre (À pierre fendre, Dégel mortel, En plein ciel, Mort en eaux vives...), and Diane E. Benson, who, in addition to her political functions, has been involved in the theatrical milieu since the 1980s, giving workshops to marginalized audiences, initiating the creation of the first independent troupe and directing some of her own plays. A whole generation born in the 1960s confirmed this new infatuation for the literary thing, the feathers then multiplied and explored spaces hitherto unsuspected, following the example of Nick Jans. Originally a journalist, he developed his talent for photography at the same time as writing, and sells his exhibition Visions of Wild Alaska as well as his various books on his website, as do Nancy Lord and Shelley Gill.
Others have gone through the traditional publishing route and have sometimes been lucky enough to gain recognition thanks to numerous international translations. Born in Fort Ykon, in the Athabaskan tribe, which numbered only a few hundred people, Velma Wallis had a huge success (more than a million copies sold worldwide) with The Gift of the Cold: An Alaskan Tale (JC Lattès) inspired by the legends that cradled her childhood. Don Rearden, who grew up on the tundra, close to the Yupik culture, has seen two of his works published by Fleuve - Le Présage du corbeau and Un dimanche soir en Alaska -, while Eowyn Ivey has found a home with 10-18(La Fille de l'hiver, Au bord de la terre glacée). If poetry books are still difficult to access for the moment and the lack of translation deprives us of the work of Joan Naviyuk Kane and Dg Nanouk Okpik, on the other hand, a publishing house is announcing itself as an interesting breeding ground. Indeed, Gallmeister has decided to introduce "Nature writing" in France, this specific trend worthy of the writings of Henry David Thoreau. It offers, in our language, some essential titles, such as Alaska, a collection of short stories by Melinda Moustakis, Sauvage, the story of a 17-year-old hunter written by Jamey Bradbury, and especially several novels by the greatest contemporary Alaskan novelist, David Vann. From the publication of his first translation in 2010 - Sukkwan Island -, this author born in 1966 on Adak Island has won over readers who have not been able to forget this anguished tête-à-tête between a father and his 13-year-old son, which ends in tragedy. Since then, each publication has been eagerly awaited and the successes follow one another: Desolation (2011), Impure (2013), Last Day on Earth (2014), The Blue Beyond (2020), etc.
To conclude, if native production is now doing well, especially thanks to the virtues of Internet distribution and self-publishing, Alaska continues to inspire foreigners, adventurers and writers. On the French side, among them is obviously Nicolas Vannier, whose love of the polar regions and of sled dogs has given rise to several stories(C'est encore loin l'Alaska? published by Albin Michel, Otchum, chef de meute published by La Martinière) that have left a lasting mark on travel literature, as well as a few documentary films, notably L'Enfant des neiges (Child of the Snows ), which takes place partly in Alaska and partly in the Klondike. For fiction, we should not forget Marie Vingtras' first novel, Blizzard, published by L'Olivier in 2021 and winner of the Prix des Libraires the following year, or Catherine Poulain's Le Grand Marin, which is also a first novel and was crowned in 2016 by several awards: Prix Étonnants voyageurs, Prix Nicolas Bouvier, Prix Gens de mer... On the American side, thanks to its film adaptation, Into the Wild has gained a worldwide reputation. This biographical story, written by Jon Krakauer in 1996, retraces the hallucinatory and hallucinatory journey of Christopher Mc Candless, a young man who wanted to confront the wilderness alone and found death. A great book, which explores both the limits of the human soul and those of nature. Older, Adventures in the Alaskan Skin Trade by John Hawkes (1925-1998) won the Prix Médicis in 1986, and is now in the Points catalog. Finally, Julie of the Wolves, the story of a 13-year-old girl who finds herself isolated in the middle of the ice because she wanted to escape a forced marriage and who finds comfort in the wildlife, has become a classic of teenage literature, due to the imagination of Jean Craighead George (1919-2012) and, of course, still available in French from L'École des loisirs.
