Literary agent Joe Allston, the central character of Stegner's novel All the Little Live Things, is now retired and, in his own words, 'just killing time until time gets around to killing me.' His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, had not been his choice. He passes through life as a spectator. A postcard from an old friend causes Allston to return to the journals of a trip he and his wife had taken years before, a journey to his mother's birthplace, where he'd sought a link with the past. The memories of that trip, both grotesque and poignant, move through layers of time and meaning, and reveal that Joe Allston isn't quite spectator enough. Wallace Stegner was the author of, among other works of fiction, Remembering Laughter (1973); The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943); Joe Hill (1950); All the Little Live Things (1967, Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star (1961); Angle of Repose (1971, Pulitzer Prize); Recapitulation (1979); Crossing to Safety (1987); and Collected Stories (1990). His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954); Wolf Willow (1963); The Sound of Mountain Water (essays, 1969); The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard deVoto (1964); American Places (with Page Stegner, 1981); and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three short stories have won O.Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements.

Where others saw only sage, a salt lake, and a great desert, the Mormons saw their “lovely Deseret,� a land of lilacs, honeycombs, poplars, and fruit trees. Unwelcome in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, they migrated to the dry lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada to establish Mormon country, a wasteland made green. Like the land the Mormons settled, their habits stood in stark contrast to the frenzied recklessness of the American West. Opposed to the often prodigal individualism of the West, Mormons lived in closely knit – some say ironclad – communities. The story of Mormon country is one of self-sacrifice and labor spent in the search for an ideal in the most forbidding territory of the American West. Richard W. Etulain provides a new introduction to this edition.

A novel of the friendships and woes of two couples, which tells the story of their lives in lyrical, evocative prose by one of the finest American writers of the late 20th century. When two young couples meet for the first time during the Great Depression, they quickly find they have much in common: Charity Lang and Sally Morgan are both pregnant, while their husbands Sid and Larry both have jobs in the English department at the University of Wisconsin. Immediately a lifelong friendship is born, which becomes increasingly complex as they share decades of love, loyalty, vulnerability and conflict. Written from the perspective of the aging Larry Morgan,Crossing to Safety is a beautiful and deeply moving exploration of the struggle of four people to come to terms with the trials and tragedies of everyday life. With an introduction by Jane Smiley. Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose (Pulitzer Prize), 1971; The Spectator Bird (National Book award), 1977; Recapitulation, 1979. Three of his short stories have won O.Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His collected stories were published in 1990. Jane Smiley is the author of many novels and works of non-fiction, including, most recently, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel", about the history and anatomy of the novel. Her most recent novel is "Good Faith". She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for "A Thousand Acres", and was shortlisted for The Orange Prize in 2001 for Horse Heaven.

Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune - in the hotel business, in new farmland and eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest. In this affecting narrative, Wallace Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family as they struggle to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century. Wallace Stegner was the author of, among other works of fiction, Remembering Laughter (1973); Joe Hill (1950); All the Little Live Things (1967, Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star (1961); Angle of Repose (1971, Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird (1976, National Book Award); Recapitulation (1979); Crossing to Safety (1987); and Collected Stories (1990). His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954); Wolf Willow (1963); The Sound of Mountain Water (essays, 1969); The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard deVoto (1964); American Places (with Page Stegner, 1981); and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three short stories have won O.Henry prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements.

Called a “magnificently crafted story . . . brimming with wisdom” by Howard Frank Mosher in The Washington Post Book World, Crossing to Safety has, since its publication in 1987, established itself as one of the greatest and most cherished American novels of the twentieth century. Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.

An American masterpiece and iconic novel of the West--a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past.
Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependant on others for his every need. Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him.

The novel tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease, Ward embarks nonetheless on a search to rediscover his grandmother, no long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier.

"He was precocious, alert, intelligent, brash, challenging, irreverent, literary, self-conscious, insecure, often ostentatiously crude, sometimes insufferable", Wallace Stegner says of Bernard DeVoto, who, in the words of a childhood acquaintance, was also "the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw". Between the disagreeable boy and the literary lion, a life unfolds, full of comedy and drama, as told in this definitive biography, which brings together two exemplary American men of letters.

Born within a dozen years of one another in small towns in Utah, both men were, as Stegner writes, "novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us". From this unique vantage point, Stegner follows DeVoto's path from his beloved but not particularly congenial Utah to the even less congenial Harvard where, galvanized by the disregard of the aesthetes around him, he commenced a career that, over three and a half decades, would embrace nearly every sort of literary enterprise: from modestly successful novels to prize-winning Western histories, from the editorship of the Saturday Review to a famously combative, long-running monthly column in Harper's, "The Easy Chair". A nuanced portrait of a stormy literary life, Stegner's biography of DeVoto is also a window on the tumultuous world of American letters in the twentieth century.

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.

Sabrina Castro is a wealthy, attractive woman married to an older society physician who no loonger fulfills her dreams. An almost accidental misstep leads her down the slow descent of moral disintegration. How she comes to terms with her life is the theme of this absorbing personal drama by the National Book Award-winning author of The Spectator Bird.

Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally powerful, vivid, and unforgettable re-creation of the Western novel, which Clark transmuted into a universal story about good and evil, individual and community, justice and human nature. As Wallace Stegner writes, [Clark's] theme was civilization, and he recorded, indelibly, its first steps in a new country.

Filled with intelligence and wit, this account follows Joe Allston, a retired literary agent, as he reflects on the transcendental aspects of his life with his wife Ruth. The arrival of a postcard from an old friend reminds him of the journals he kept during a long-ago trip to his mother's Danish hometown. The memories of that trip--both grotesque and poignant--awaken feelings and lead him to confront long neglected questions while revealing that he has not quite passed through life as a mere spectator. "Llena de inteligencia e ingenio, este relato sigue a Joe Allston, un agente literario retirado, mientras reflexiona sobre los aspectos trascendentales de su vida con su esposa, Ruth. La llegada de una postal de un viejo amigo le recuerda del diario que escribio durante un viaje hace anos a la ciudad natal de su madre danesa. Los recuerdos de ese viaje--tanto grotescos como conmovedores--despiertan sentimientos y lo llevan a enfrentarse a preguntas que se han cuidado sin contestar por mucho tiempo mientras revelan que el no ha pasado por la vida como un simple espectador."

A book about America by one of the greatest writers of the American West This book is an attempt, by sampling, to say something about how the American people and the American land have interacted, how they have shaped one another; what patterns of life, with what chances of continuity, have arisen out of the confrontations between an unformed society and a virgin continent. Perhaps it is less a book about the American land than some ruminationsabout the making of America. . . . We are the unfinished product of a long becoming. --from American Places For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Louis Tikas was a union organizer killed in the battle between striking coal miners and state militia in Ludlow, Colorado, in 1914. In "Buried Unsung" he stands for a whole generation of immigrant workers who, in the years before World War I, found themselves caught between the realities of industrial America and their aspirations for a better life.

A New England village, untouched by history since the American Revolution, is the unquiet arena containing, but just barely, the aloof natives and the summer residents. Their paths cross, happily or disastrously, in a book that seems too real to be fiction. As Wallace Stegner writes, the conflict on this particular frontier "has been reproduced in an endlessly changing pattern all over the United States." "Wallace Stegner's story about a rural community is told with subtle restraint in a style which is often poetic and always sensitive."-Chicago Sun Book Week "Incisive, restrained character delineation reminiscent of Willa Cather. Strongly recommended."-Library Journal "Second Growth . . . is a creation of remarkable penetration and skill. Its small, accurate touches build up to a full and firm whole. Its objectivity, its air of knowledge and judgment, are accompanied by an almost lyrical, delicately restrained tenderness. Its prose is disciplined, sensitive and luminous."-New York Times

Written during World War II and its immediate aftermath, the eighteen stories of "The Women on the Wall" move from women to war and back again, but it is the women who remain central. There are Alma, a war bride who runs a farm better than the neighbor men; Lucy, a former WAAF, working through college; Tamsen, who keeps her husband drunk so she can do as she pleases; and the women on the wall, who, with nothing to do but wait for their husbands to return from the war, find their private consolations. To these stories Wallace Stegner brings the same skill and thoughtfulness that won him the National Book Award for "The Spectator Bird"

In a literary career spanning more than fifty years, Wallace Stegner created a remarkable record of the history and culture of twentieth-century America. Each of the thirty-one stories contained in this volume embody some of the best virtues and values to be found in contemporary fiction, demonstrating why the author is acclaimed as one of America's master storytellers. BACKCOVER: ?Exemplary stories . . . The reader of Stegner's writing is immediately reminded of an essential America . . . a distinct place, a unique people, a common history, and a shared heritage remembered as only Stegner can.?
"?Los Angeles Times"

"A finger smashed in a car door and a missed geology examination at the University of Utah led Wallace Stegner to a special assignment about Clarence E. Dutton, thence to John Wesley Powell, and finally in 1954 to publication of what is arguably the single best nonfiction book dealing with the American West. "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian" remains in print fifty-two years after its initial appearance. Not many books have survived that length of time and thrived, despite competing works on the same subject.
This combination of biography, history, and environmental primer written with the flair and the technical skill of a novelist who could masterfully evoke scenes and sustain a gripping factual narrative sprang from "Clarence Edward Dutton: An Appraisal." Seldom has such a classic book had such a humble beginning.
Stegner was a young English instructor at the University of Utah when he produced the Dutton essay. He was ambitious and desperate for recognition, a raise (he was earning $1,700 a year), and steady employment in the Depression years. The essay contains hints, in terms of style and content, of what Stegner would eventually produce. "Dutton" was Stegner's first published work of nonfiction, and it is fair to say that it lead him, in conjunction with Bernard DeVoto's prodding, to the subject of conservation."
--from the foreword
"Clarence Edward Dutton: An Appraisal" was first published by the University of Utah in 1936 and has since become a rarity on the antiquarian book market. It is reproduced in facsimile for this edition.