The Girl of the Golden West

Belasco, David, 1853-1931Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.5
Word count
422K words
Chapters
43

Tags

English Originals Dramatic Literature Legendary LivesAdventure JourneyLove EntanglementsScreen AdaptationGold Rush EraWestern Region FlavorFemale Perspective

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Girl of the Golden West by David BelascoAuthor: Belasco, David, 1853-1931,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Feb 1, 2019

Editor's review

The Girl of the Golden West is one of the representative plays by the American playwright David Belasco. Set in the California wilderness during the Gold Rush, it revolves around the emotional entanglement between a saloon mistress, a fugitive, and a lawman. As a stage text, its value lies first in dramatic tension: concentrated scenes, sharp conflict, and dialogue full of action make it a direct way to feel the narrative rhythm and stagecraft of late nineteenth-century American popular drama. Second, the female figure is independent and forthright, retaining moral judgment in a rough western environment, which makes the play a point of entry for observing gender imagination and frontier myth at the time. This is a public-domain electronic edition from Project Gutenberg in the original English, easy to search and cite, suitable for drama researchers, readers of English literature, and those interested in western subjects. Read it as a play meant for staging rather than as a novel; paying attention to stage directions and entrances and exits will give a fuller sense of Belasco's control of theatrical effect as a producer.

Who it's for

A good fit for

Not a good fit for

Reading tips

  1. Read the character list and stage directions first, reconstruct the scene in your mind, then move into the dialogue.
  2. Read by act aloud or role-play to feel the action and rhythm of the lines.
  3. Read alongside background material on California society during the Gold Rush to understand the characters' motives.
  4. After reading, compare with the plot outline of Puccini's opera of the same name and compare what was changed in adaptation.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34
  35. 35
  36. 36
  37. 37
  38. 38
  39. 39
  40. 40
  41. 41
  42. 42
  43. 43

FAQ

Is this a novel or a play? This is a stage play by Belasco, including a character list, act divisions, stage directions, and dialogue, not a narrative novel. When reading, imagine the staged performance according to the logic of a script.
How difficult is the English, and what background is needed? The text is late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century American English; the dialogue is colloquial but contains some period expressions and western slang. Readers with reading ability roughly at CET-4 or above who are willing to look up words can generally read it through.
What are the features of this edition? This is a public-domain electronic edition released by Project Gutenberg, in the original English, with no Chinese notes or introduction. It is convenient for full-text search, citation, and free access, and suitable for research or comparative reading.
What is its relationship to Puccini's opera? Puccini's opera La fanciulla del West was adapted from this play, retaining the basic plot skeleton and main characters. If you know the opera, you can read them side by side and observe what was added or cut in structure, lyrics, and scenes from play to opera.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Belasco, David, 1853-1931 Author

David Belasco (1853–1931) was an influential American playwright and stage director, known for his meticulous pursuit of stage effects and realistic detail. Four of his works are held in this collection, with The Return of Peter Grimm and The Girl of the Golden West as representative titles; the latter was adapted into a Puccini opera, showing the reach of his plays in his time. His scripts often draw on life in the American West and on supernatural themes, with tight plots and strong theatrical scenes, and he emphasized lighting and scenery to create mood, leaving a practical mark on the staging of early twentieth-century American commercial theater. Because public information is limited, his early years, detailed biography, and chronology of works are difficult to set out here; this note relies only on the collection's holdings and verifiable theater-history common knowledge, focusing on his thematic interests and stage style.