Marking the Sparrow's Fall: Wallace Stegner's American West (A John Macrae Book)

Marking the Sparrow's Fall: Wallace Stegner's American West (A John Macrae Book)

Presents a collection of essays, including fifteen published for the first time, along with the novella "Genesis" Born on an Iowa farm in 1909, Wallace Stegner was of the last generation to see the frontier West. His father, Stegner recalled in an autobiographical essay, was a land speculator who dragged his family from one dusty Western town to another in search of easy riches, and who "died broke and friendless in a fleabag hotel, having in his lifetime done more human and environmental damage than he could have repaired in a second lifetime." It was not an auspicious beginning, but the transient youth found his home in the small libraries of towns such as Yuma, Kanab, Alamosa, Cardston, and Rock Springs. The books he read there, including John Wesley Powell's Explorations of the Colorado River and Mark Twain's Roughing It , helped him put his life into a native context; when he began to write, first articles and then books such as Beyond the Hundredth Meridian and The Sound of Mountain Water , he did so as a proud Westerner, disinclined to apologize to Eastern readers for living by choice in the Great American Outback. Stegner lived long enough to see the transformation of the American West from a vast land punctuated by small farming and ranching towns to a place of huge cities driven by high technology and the military-industrial complex. He began to write about this transformation early on, and especially about areas where urban civilization encroached on undeveloped lands. His essay "Wilderness Letter" of 1962 has often been cited as an organizing document of the then-forming environmental movement, widely discussed in connection with such matters as the damming of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon and in Dinosaur National Monument; in it, Stegner alludes to wilderness as "a part of the geography of hope," a phrase that has become a byword of modern environmentalism. (Edward Abbey, who studied creative writing under Stegner at Stanford University, adopted it as a personal mantra.) "Wilderness Letter" and other of Stegner's writings for magazines such as the New Yorker and Holiday , many of them previously uncollected, are reprinted in this collection, which underscores the importance of Stegner's work to the development of Western regional literature and of contemporary ecological letters alike. Marking the Sparrow's Fall , edited by Stegner's son Page, makes for a fine introduction to Stegner's conservation works--other anthologies will have to address his contributions as a historian (e.g., Mormon Country ) and as a novelist (e.g., Angle of Repose )--and it should help bring readers to the books in which Stegner elaborated environmental themes, such as Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs and The American West As Living Space . --Gregory McNamee A prolific and gifted writer, Wallace Stegner (1909-93) helped shape the literature of the American West. Here Stegner's son Page collects a series of his father's writing, including environmental essays and the "Wilderness Letter," which is often cited as one of the seminal documents of the environmental movement. The essays are grouped into three general sections?autobiographical, ecological, and academic?followed by the novella "Genesis." Though each section's preface gives publication dates where appropriate, individual essays are not dated according to when they were originally written, making it difficult to place them in historical context. All the essays are polished and intelligent compositions. Recommended for all Stegner collections as well as environmental and regional collections.?Katherine K. Koenig, Ellis Sch., Greensburg, PA Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. A greatest-hits package from the late dean of western American letters. Stegner (19121993), already widely respected as a novelist and historian, became a hero of the environmentalist movement with his 1962 ``Wilderness Letter,'' which made a plea to protect public lands in the west. He revisited this theme often while writing magazine pieces with western settings, most of which Stegner himself roundly dismissed as ``grocery-buying junk.'' His son Page Stegner, a historian, has collected representative essays here, a handful of whichmostly travelogues and op-ed piecesindeed seem to have been written for a quick boost in disposable income. Most of the others are, however, vintage Stegner, written with an eye toward educating the reader in the historical and ecological value of the western landscape. Stegner visits Lake Powell, the 200-mile-long result of damming Glen Canyon on the Colorado River; travels down the backroads of Utah and Saskatchewan; and wanders through western ghost towns. As he does so, he offers lessons from the past and warnings about the future, writing, for instance, ``No western states except those on the Pacific Coast can permanently support large populations''and this at a time before Nevada, Arizona, or Colorado had