Marking the Sparrow's Fall The Making of the American West

by Stegner, Wallace; Stegner, Page

• ISBN13: 9780805062960
• ISBN10: 0805062963
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1999-09-15
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Summary

Winner of three O. Henry Awards, the Commonwealth Gold Medal, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Kirsch Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement, Wallace Stegner was a literary giant. In Marking the Sparrow's Fall, the first collection of Stegner's work published since his death, Stegner's son Page has collected, annotated, and edited fifteen essays that have never before been published in any edition, as well as a little-known novella and several of Stegner's best-known essays on the American West. Seventy-five percent of the contents of this body of work is published here for the first time. This is Wallace Stegner's most comprehensive collection of writings, and the first since his death in 1993. His son, Page, has selected fifteen essays that have never before been published in any book and placed them alongside Stegner's most powerful pieces in the book's three nonfiction parts: Home Ground (memory), Testimony (defense of the earth), and Inheritance (history). The fourth section of the book is devoted to a magnificent little-known novella,Genesis. As Page Stegner writes of this collection, "It is as complete and comprehensive a statement as we are ever likely to have about what it means to be a westerner, about what it means to know ourselves as a 'part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.'" "A true masterpiece . . . among the finest work about the West and its meaning."Caroline Fraser,Los Angeles Times Book Review "One of the greatest contemporary writers."Washington Post

Author Biography

The winner of a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, Wallace Stegner is the author of a dozen novels and as many works of nonfiction, including Angle of Repose, The Spectator Bird, and Crossing to Safety. The founder and director of the graduate writing program at Stanford University, he spent much of his life in northern California and Vermont. He died in 1993.

Page Stegner is the author of many books. For twenty-eight years he served as Professor of American Literature and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He now divides his time between northeastern Vermont and northern California.

Table of Contents

Foreword: I Sing of America	p. xi
Preface	p. xv
Home Ground
Child of the Far Frontier	p. 5
The Making of Paths	p. 11
That Great Falls Year	p. 16
At Home in the Fields of the Lord	p. 29
Xanadu by the Salt Flats	p. 38
The World's Strangest Sea	p. 46
Lake Powell	p. 57
Back Roads River	p. 68
Back Roads of the American West	p. 82
Why I Like the West	p. 96
Testimony
Wilderness Letter	p. 111
It All Began with Conservation	p. 121
The Best Idea We Ever Had	p. 135
Qualified Homage to Thoreau	p. 143
Living on Our Principal	p. 149
Bernard DeVoto	p. 161
Conservation Equals Survival	p. 174
Now, If I Ruled the World ...	p. 182
Inheritance
The Twilight of Self-Reliance	p. 189
Living Dry	p. 213
The Rocky Mountain West	p. 230
Land: America's History Teacher	p. 260
Genesis
Genesis	p. 281
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