Marking the Sparrow's Fall: Wallace Stegner's American West [B1613]

1998 HCDJ in nice condition except for ink-underlined text on some pages. 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 (1909-1993) was an early conservationist and 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.

From recent-ish Amazon/GoodReads reviews: "Wow. big book, big themes, big country, big movements, big disputes. Wallace Stegner nails them all. I loved his writing. My favorite parts were Home Ground and Inheritance and the novella Genesis at the end. We have traveled to many of the places mentioned in Home Ground but only driven and taken short hikes; never ran a rapid. They are all special places to us. We saw them years after Mr. Stegner wrote but still loved them. Ah, the West, ever in our hearts."; "Stegner writes about his family's migration from Canada to the United States, traveling around extensively and eventually calling Salt Lake City his home base. His essays describe the development of the West from the early discovery through the late 1900s. His descriptions of the Rocky Mountain and Northwest Pacific states include the historical development of protected lands, national monuments, and national parks as precious commodities that need preservation for the enjoyment of future generations and the protection of the environment."; "Legacy. A heartwarming collection of essays and a novella by the Dickens of the American West."; "Wallace Stegner won just about every literary prize an author can win, and he taught a new generation of writers during the Sixties at Stanford University. His students included Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Thomas McGuane, Ernest Gaines, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey, M. Scott Momaday, and many more published authors. This collection of essays was published posthumously and my favorite was Qualified Homage to Thoreau. Stegner took on John Muir's role as an environmentalist and advocate for the public parks system, but he also did not support the political protesters in the Sixties. His critique of Thoreau explains his feelings towards civil disobedience, and that is just as relevant today."; "Most of the essays in this collection have never been published before and those that have are some of Stegner's most famous pieces. For any Western enthusiast, this collection is worth reading in spite of a smattering of dated concepts and ideas. In reality, most of the issues remain very relevant today."