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Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner

  • In this moving sequel to Big Rock Candy Mountain, Bruce Mason returns to Salt Lake City, not for his aunt’s funeral but to encounter after forty-five years the place he fled in bitterness. A successful statesman and diplomat, Mason had buried his awkward and lonely childhood and sealed himself off from the thrills and torments of adolescence to become a figure who commanded international respect.

    But the realities of the present recede in the face of the ghosts of his past. As he makes the perfunctory arrangements for the funeral, we enter with him on an intensely personal and painful inner pilgrimage, meeting the father who darkened his childhood, the mother whose support was both redeeming and embarrassing, the friend who drew him into the respectable world of which he so craved to be a part, and the woman he nearly married.

    In this profoundly moving book, Stegner has drawn an intimate portrait of a man understanding how his life has been shaped by experiences seemingly remote and inconsequential.

  • Margaret Stuart, the proud wife of a prosperous Iowa farmer, sets high standards for herself and others. Happy in her marriage, she tries to look the other way when her genial husband, Alec, takes to the bottle. When Elspeth, Margaret’s sister, comes to live with them, the young woman is immediately captivated by the beauty and vitality of the farm and by the affection she receives from those around her. But as summer turns into fall and the friendship between Alec and Elspeth deepens, Margaret finds her spirit tested by a series of events that seem as cruel and inevitable as the endless prairie winters.

    Remembering Laughter marked Wallace Stegner’s brilliant literary debut.

  • Sabrina Castro is a wealthy, attractive woman with a strong New England heritage who is married to an older California physician who no longer fulfills her dreams. As she seeks the meaning of love, an almost accidental misstep leads her down the path of moral disintegration, until there is no place for her to go except up and out. How she comes to terms with her life is the theme of this absorbing personal drama played out against the backdrop of an old Peninsula estate where her mother lives among her servants, her memories of Boston, and her treasured family archives. Now on audio for the first time, A Shooting Star displays the storytelling powers that Wallace Stegner’s fans have enjoyed for more than half a century.

  • Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner recounts the remarkable career of Major John Wesley Powell, the distinguished ethnologist and geologist who explored the Colorado River, the Grand Canyon, and the homeland of the Southwest Indian tribes. This classic work is a penetrating and insightful study of Powell's career, from the beginning of the Powell Survey, in which Powell and his men famously became the first to descend the Colorado River, to his eventual ouster from the Geological Survey. In masterful prose, Stegner details the expedition, as well as the philosophies and ideas that drove Powell.

    A prophet without honor who had a profound understanding of the American West, Powell warned long ago of the dangers economic exploitation would pose to the West—and he spent a good deal of his life battling Washington politics to get his message across. Only now may we recognize just how accurate a prophet he was.

  • Award-winning and bestselling author Wallace Stegner takes on the hippy generation in a novel of "crackling vividness" (New York Times Book Review).

    Joe Allston, the retired literary agent in Stegner's National Book Award–winning novelThe Spectator Bird, returns in this disquieting and keenly observed novel. Scarred by the senseless death of their son and baffled by the engulfing chaos of the 1960s, Allston and his wife, Ruth, have left the coast for a California retreat. And although their new home looks like Eden, it also has its serpents: Jim Peck, a messianic exponent of drugs, yoga, and sex, and Marian Catlin, an attractive young woman whose otherwordly innocence is far more appealing—and far more dangerous.

  • Bo Mason, his wife, and his 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 his fortune in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running throughout the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest. Each peak of success takes him a little bit higher, and each valley sinks him lower than ever before—both financially and in his relationship with his family.

    Based largely on his own childhood, Stegner has created a masterful, harrowing saga of a family trying to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century. It is the conflict between the hardscrabble existence and Bo's pursuit of the frontier myth and of the American Dream that gives the book such resonance and power.

  • Wallace Stegner’s uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian, who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward’s investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. The result is a deeply moving novel that, through the prism of one family, illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past.

    Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical—that endures as Wallace Stegner’s masterwork, an illumination of yesterday’s reality that speaks to today’s.

  • Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "killing time before 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 a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he had taken with his wife twenty 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, read aloud to his wife so she too can reminisce, move through layers of time and meaning and reveal that Joe Allston isn't quite spectator enough.

    This portrait of a husband and wife's marriage and a son's pursuit of his mother's memory is a literary masterpiece.