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

Stegner lived long enough to see the transformation of the American West from a vast land punctuated by small farming and ranching towns to a place of huge cities driven by high technology and the military-industrial complex. He began to write about this transformation early on, and especially about areas where urban civilization encroached on undeveloped lands. His essay "Wilderness Letter" of 1962 has often been cited as an organizing document of the then-forming environmental movement, widely discussed in connection with such matters as the damming of the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon and in Dinosaur National Monument; in it, Stegner alludes to wilderness as "a part of the geography of hope," a phrase that has become a byword of modern environmentalism. (Edward Abbey, who studied creative writing under Stegner at Stanford University, adopted it as a personal mantra.) "Wilderness Letter" and other of Stegner's writings for magazines such as the New Yorker and Holiday, many of them previously uncollected, are reprinted in this collection, which underscores the importance of Stegner's work to the development of Western regional literature and of contemporary ecological letters alike. Marking the Sparrow's Fall, edited by Stegner's son Page, makes for a fine introduction to Stegner's conservation works--other anthologies will have to address his contributions as a historian (e.g., Mormon Country) and as a novelist (e.g., Angle of Repose)--and it should help bring readers to the books in which Stegner elaborated environmental themes, such as Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs and The American West As Living Space. --Gregory McNamee