Customer Reviews

Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

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This wonderful collection of essays and fiction about the last Western frontier is both romance and anti-romance. Writing in the 1950s, Stegner captures the breath-taking beauty of the unbroken plains of southwest Saskatchewan and the excitement of its settlment at the turn of the century. Part memoir, the book recounts the years of his boyhood in a small town along the Whitemud River in 1914-1919, the summers spent on the family's homestead 50 miles away along the Canadian-U.S border. His book is also an account of the loss of that Eden and the failed promise of agricultural development in this semi-arid region with thin top soil.

Stegner is a gifted, intelligent writer, able to turn the people and events of history into compelling reading. The opening section of the book describes the experience of being on the plains and specifically in the area where Stegner was a boy. And it lays out the geography of that land -- a distant range of hills, the river, the coulees, the town -- which the book will return to again and again.

The following section evokes the period of frontier Canada's early exploration, the emergence of the metis culture, the destruction of the buffalo herds, the introduction of rangeland cattle, and then wave upon wave of settlement pushing the last of the plains Indians westward and northward. A chapter is devoted to the surveying of the boundary along the Canada-U.S. border; another chapter describes the founding of the Mounted Police and its purely Canadian style of bringing law and order to the wild west.

The middle section of the book is a novella and a short story about the winter of 1906-1907. In the longer piece, eight men rounding up cattle are caught on the open plains in an early blizzard. Stegner builds the drama and the peril of their situation artfully and convincingly. The final section of the book returns to Stegner's memories of the town and the homestead, ending with his family's departure for Montana.

Stegner lived at a time and in a place where a person born in the 20th century could still experience something of the sweep of history that transformed the American plains. I've read many books about the West, and because of his depth of thought, his gifts as a writer, and his unflinching eye, Stegner's work ranks for me among the best. I heartily recommend this book.

Wolf Willow is one third local history of the Cypress Hills area of Saskatchewan, One third compelling fiction and one third memior.

The book is an intimate, knowing portrait of the area and an insightful meditation of what living on a frontier was like, not just writing about it or seeing romanticized movies.

While Stegner sometimes suffers from being the creative writing professor he was, for my time and money he remains the preeminent literary voice of the West. As with almost all of his work, Wolf Willow is an engrossing read and will leave you thinking long after you close the back cover.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Wallace Stegner grew up on the prairie frontiers of North Dakota, Saskatchewan, and Montana, and in the mountains of Utah. As is indicated by the subtitle, this volume combines history, a memoir, and historical fiction. Readers who have spent significant time on the snow swept northern steppes may find a small part of themselves, and of this land, in Wolf Willow. ...
"On those miraculously beautiful and murderously cold nights glittering with the green and blue darts from a sky like polished dark metal, when the moon had gone down, leaving the hollow heavens to the stars and the overflowing cold light of the Aurora, he thought he had moments of the clearest vision ... In every direction ... the snow spread; here and there the implacable plain glinted back a spark - the beam of a cold star reflected in a crystal of ice." (The scene evokes in me a powerful memory, as I recall often standing alone on just such "murderously cold" snow blanketed prairies and gazing into those "miraculously beautiful" night skies.)

Wallace Stegner spent a large part of his childhood on nearly the last terrestrial frontier in Continental North America, a harsh corner of southwestern Sasakatchewan. Wolf Willow tells the story of that experience, other great stories about the history and culture of the region, and Stegner's views on going back to the town he grew up in. In reading Wolf Willow, you begin to realize the depth of the loss we've suffered as Western humanity has moved almost exclusively into homogenized, plasticized communities without an iota of the challenge or color Stegner experienced in his youth. Will there ever be another writer like Stegner? Probably not, unless we somehow recapture the crucible of existence chronicled so magnificently in Wolf Willow.

This book has no right to be so absorbing. Though the topic of this forgotten book by Wallace Stegner reeks of self-indulgence-- A writer returns to where he grew up, reminisces about his youth and the history of the frontier town his transient childhood most identified as home and concludes with a 100-page fictionalized account of a the terrible winter of 1906-- he manages to tie his past inexorably to ours, linking his nostalgia for his youth with our own, and exploring the promise and inevitable waste of the American Dream lived out on our frontiers.

Stegner, like Proust, experiences an "ancient, unbearable recognition" spurred by a return to the sites, sounds, and most importantly, smells of his childhood. He dreams of this period and is "haunted, on awakening, by a sense of meanings just withheld, and by a profound nostalgic melancholy." Everyone has some awareness of a deep meaning lurking in our past that has not, or cannot, be fully interpreted.

Perhaps the best part of the book is section three, the novella length exposition on the hope and danger of the high plains that does a superb job of creating looming dread as the winter drops hard on the land. Near the end of section three, Stegner expounds on what it is to be an American pursuing the Dream:

"How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of progress? One who has lived the dream, the temporary fulfillment, and the disappointment has had the full course.... The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savagery and freedom of the wild. Any who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world."

Stegner, whose ambitious works stand as one of the finest legacies of fiction in any language, chronicles his early years in the praries of Dakotas and nearby provinces with some of the most poetic and dignified prose ever offered. Like the author's Angle of Repose, Recapitulation, or Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wolf Willow provides a window to West as experienced by youth; as opposed to merely read. Anyone raised in the West near canyons, who knows the smell of pinon and pepper tress or simple brush of wind over open space of grasslands will identify with and appreciate this gift of autobiography. It breathes like dandelion wine uncorked years after being stored. Highly recommend

Part history and part dreamy reminiscence, this book is an account of a boy growing up in Southwest Saskatchewan in the early part of the 20th Century. The central portion of the book is pure history, and the long chapters on cowboys are particularly challenging because they require an intimate knowledge of cowboy terminology. Stegner does not mince words about the difficulties of life on the plains--extremes of heat and cold, wind, hostile topography, lack of cultural amenities--the result of which is that most who grew up there moved elsewhere. But he also shows a passionate attachment for the country of his childhood. The narrative often seems rambling because, like James Michener, the author tries to incorporate so much besides history--including the biology and geology of the nearby Cypress Hills, the biologically diverse area nearby--and even his poetic musings have elements of fact, as when he describes the wind, or the gophers, or his swimming hole, or his school, or his family's homestead, or the problems involved in the town's incorporation.

Stegner, whose ambitious works stand as one of the finest legacies of fiction in any language, chronicles his early years in the praries of Dakotas and nearby provinces with some of the most poetic and dignified prose ever offered. Like the author's Angle of Repose, Recapitulation, or Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wolf Willow provides a window to West as experienced by youth; as opposed to merely read. Anyone raised in the West near canyons, who knows the smell of pinon and pepper tress or simple brush of wind over open space of grasslands will identify with and appreciate this gift of autobiography. It breathes like dandelion wine uncorked years after being stored. Highly recommend

Over the past couple of months, I have brought up "Wolf Willow" to a couple of friends who are readers. It's a difficult book to sell to friends, though. Ones says, "Well, it's part history, part
essay, part memoir, and their eyes glaze over." Today I took the bull by the horns and bought a copy and had it sent to the second friend. Then I realized that I hadn't bothered to leave a
review on amazon.com, and so here I am, like the Ancient Mariner, to tug at people's sleeves, hoping that anyone who happens by this site might read my words and be tilted toward buying
this book. It is wonderful. You don't need to take my advice: look at the reviews by famous people, and see that V. Nabokov found it "enthralling, captivating, and infinitely ...." oh, I can't
remember the exact words, buy Nabokov's point was that he envied Stegner's work in this book. (For Nabokov, that's high praise).

And that's it. If you reading these words, you're half-way home, half-way to deciding to read this book. I hope these words are the finger on the scale that makes you purchase "Wolf Willow."
If you do, you'll remember this review, I'll bet.

Stegner once again reveals his writing prowess, This time in a self-indulgent adventure to haunts of his youth.

I have some qualms about this work, however. In particular, I was not so keen on those parts where Stegner relied heavily on book-based history that never directly touched his own life. To be frank, his writing in these parts surprisingly got a bit stodgy.

His thought on sense of place and belonging, however, are remarkable, hitting me right between the eyes. Indeed, he had me wistfully recalling my own childhood in what seemed a remote area of the world with the archaeological junk heap and all. In measuring his boyhood to my own, I noted how little times had changed in that interval of 60-70 years and how much has changed for kids in the last 40. It had me wondering how my own sons lives would be different were it not for the MAFIA (mother's against fun in America).