The Sound of Mountain Water - by Wallace Stegner (Paperback)

About the Book

Written over a 25-year period, during a time when the West witnessed rapid changes to its cultural and natural heritage, the essays, memoirs, letters and speeches contained in "The Sound of Mountain Water" established Wallace Stegner's reputation as an important conservationist and novelist.

Book Synopsis

A book of timeless importance about the American West and a modern classic by National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Wallace Stegner.

"Stegner catches the paradoxical essence of American civilzation." --Choice

The essays, memoirs, letters, and speeches collected in The Sound of Mountain Water encompass memoir, nature conservation, history, geography, and literature. Compositions delve into the post-World War II boom that brought the Rocky Mountain West--from Montana and Idaho to Utah and Nevada--into the modern age. Other works feature eloquent sketches of the West's history and environment, directing our imagination to the sublime beauty of such places as Robbers Roost and Glen Canyon. A final section examines the state of Western literature, of the mythical past and the diminished present, and analyzesd the difficulties facing any contemporary Western writer.

Written over a period of twenty-five years, a time in which the West witnessed rapid changes to its cultural and natural heritage, and by a writer and thinker who will always hold a unique position in modern American letters, The Sound of Mountain Water is a hymn to the Western landscape, an affirmation of the hope emobided therein, and a careful and rich investigation of the West's complex legacy.

Review Quotes

"Stegner catches the paradoxical essence of American civilzation." --Choice

"Like Faulkner, Stegner sired a stable of writers fired with an ambition to chronicle the region and force upon the nation a new and 'demythologized" view of the West." --The Weekly Standard

"Stegner pleads for a Western literature that will meaningfully link past and present. Easygoing essays by a writer of venerable and popular reputation." --Kirkus Reviews

About the Author

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.