Book excerpt: The Western Home: A Literary History of Norwegian America is a history of American literature. It is different from other histories of American literature in that the language of the writers and their readers was not English. There have been studies of American authors who have used languages such as French, German, Spanish, or Swedish, but this is the first comprehensive history of any literature written and read in the United States in another language than English. Indeed, most histories of American literature are based on the theory that English is the only American literary language. Such a theory, however, dismisses the fact that English has in periods been a minority language in many areas. In this book American literature is the literature of people who are American by choice or by birth regardless of the language they may have used. This book demonstrates that Norwegian has indeed been an American literary language and that many of the American writers in this language deserve our attention.