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

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Wallace Stegner spent over fifty years writing and cranked out a tremendous amount of stuff -- fifteen novels, five histories, two biographies, plus hundreds of articles and short stories and occassional pieces. Consequently, much of this has not been republished. "Marking the Sparrow's Fall" is a new anthology edited by Stegner's son, Page, and a great introduction to all of his work. Uniquely, though, most of it is an unearthing of previously uncollected non-fiction.

Stegner himself referred to these pieces as "junk" that he wrote to buy the groceries with, but I think we would all be hard-pressed to agree with him. His son comments in the preface that most of this writing remained uncollected simply because Stegner -- a tremendously busy man -- forgot about it. "None of it qualifies as 'grocery-buying junk'", Page notes, "... certainly not the humor of 'Why I Like the West,' wherein he insists that as a wild man from the West 'I have always done my best to live up to what tradition says I should be. I have always tried to look like Gary Cooper and talk like the Virginian. I have endeavored to be morally upright, courteous to women; with an innate sense of right and wrong but without the polish that Yale College or European travel might have put upon me. I have consented to be forgiven my frontier gaucheries, and I did not hold it against the waiter in the Parker House bar when he removed my feet from the upholstery."

So here you'll find a handful of Stegner's better-known non-fiction -- two abridged chapters from "Wolf Willow", the "Wilderness Letter", and some other essays -- plus his famous short-story, "Genesis", the tale of an Englishman on the Saskatchewan frontier during the winter of 1906. But most of the book is made up of otherwise hard-to-find material, like his sketch, "Xanadu By the Salt Flats," the recollection of a summer he spent when he was fifteen flipping hot dogs at Saltair, an amusement park on the shores of Great Salt Lake.

Throughout the book, one is captivated by Stegner's incredible power to evoke the people and landscape and unfinished wars of the American West, a power that made him a pillar of the budding environmental movement in the 1950s and in the years up to his death in 1994. Personally, I found some of his conservation pieces in the middle of the book to be less interesting than his autobiographical sketches and fiction -- as I think anyone would -- but no Stegner anthology would be complete without them.

If you've never read Stegner, I guarantee you'll love this anthology. If you have read Stegner, this is a great way to get to know some of his lesser-known short pieces. A+ and five stars.

Many of us feel we don't have enough time to read. One way to maximize the time we do have is to find an author skilled in multiple writing fields. Wallace Stegner was an essayist, historian, environmental advocate, and fiction writer whose pen was at home in many genres. Marking the Sparrow's Fall is an essay collection that blends personal narrative, American (especially western) history, and environmental advocacy, with the skill of a good fiction writer.

The book's first section "Home Ground" contains poignant but factual memoirs about Stegner's childhood spent hopping from one parched western town to the next with no chance to put roots down. On the subjects of aridity, orphaning, and rootlessness, Stegner was a pro. Essays in Section Two "Testimony" concern broader environmental and land use issues but are blessedly free of the arrogant self-righteous tone of much environmental writing. Stegner explains engagingly how we as Americans got from medieval Europe, where non aristocrats could not buy land, to Earth Day first celebrated in 1970. Stegner's famous "Wilderness Letter" is here; it argued for the idea of wilderness as a cornerstone of social health.

Section Three "Inheritance" includes a stunning work called "The Twilight of Self Reliance," a tough-minded caring discussion of what's happened to the confidence settlers brought to America 200 years ago. It's as much a modern call to remember what we Americans try as a nation to be as it is a history lesson. The story "Genesis" that concludes the book puts the ideas of "Twilight" in a fictional frame. If you want a read that's rich, funny, alarming, optimistic, and sad--one that doesn't waste your time--this book is for you. Stegner's voice is one you can trust, and it's very much alive today.