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when she fully comprehended and appreciated him?” He remains somewhat mysterious to us, almost mythic in stature. He suffers the slings and arrows of many misfortunes, both personal and professional, silently. One wound that has surely grown and festered over the years is his wife’s disappointment in his inability to achieve the material success that would have raised them socially. He can do his job well, but his sense of duty leads him to pass up opportunities in order to stay with his family, and he is too honest to compete in the helter-skelter western world of get-rich-quick exploitation. At heart, Lyman tells us, he was a builder, not a raider.

This is a thoughtful book with a rich panoply of characters, both major and minor, and one that explores many themes, themes that bring the novel into the center of our culture. Like The Great Gatsby, it helps us define who we, as a people in this new land, are. Oliver in his gallant romanticism is our Gatsby, and Susan in her own romantic snobbish world is our Daisy, and ne’er the twain shall meet until at the end they find their angle of repose. We have all, to use Fitzgerald’s words, looked toward the “fresh, green breast of the New World,” and we all believe, or would like to believe, in the American Dream, although we each may define that dream in our own way. We may, like Willie Loman, be defeated by the system or by our own self-delusions, but we can only live and try to go forward if we believe. Our going forward, of course, often means going west, looking for the main chance, as Stegner’s own father did, or as Bo Mason, the character in The Big Rock Candy Mountain modeled after George Stegner, did, or as Oliver and Susan Ward did. East versus West, civilization versus opportunity is a theme at the heart of the American experience. And as our boats beat ceaselessly into the past to find our future, we continue to ask, What have we inherited?

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

WORKS BY WALLACE STEGNER

All the Little Live Things. New York: Viking, 1967.

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.

Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. New York: Random House, 1990.

Crossing to Safety. New York: Random House, 1987.

Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: Wallace Stegner’s American West. Edited by Page Stegner. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. New York: Random House, 1992.

Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier. New York: Viking, 1962.

BIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS

Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Viking, 1996.

Etulain, Richard W., ed. Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Colberg, Nancy. Wallace Stegner: A Descriptive Bibliography. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1990.

CRITICAL BOOKS AND ESSAY COLLECTIONS ON THE LIFE AND WORKS OF WALLACE STEGNER

Arthur, Anthony ed. Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.

Meine, Curt, ed. Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision: Essays on Literature, History, and Landscape. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997.

Rankin, Charles E., ed. Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.

Robinson, Forrest G., and Margaret G. Robinson. Wallace Stegner. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

I

GRASS VALLEY

1

Now I believe they will leave me alone. Obviously Rodman came up hoping to find evidence of my incompetence—though how an incompetent could have got this place renovated, moved his library up, and got himself transported to it without arousing the suspicion of his watchful children, ought to be a hard one for Rodman to answer. I take some pride in the way I managed all that. And he went away this afternoon without a scrap of what he would call data.

So tonight I can