It is altogether appropriate that Wallace Stegner should weave writings out of memory together with essays on the West and appreciations of other writers. For years, his acclaimed works have indicated his passion for the past, for the future, for truth, for the western reaches of the United States, and for the best in art, whether produced by man or nature.Stegner is called the dean of western writers; Ivan Doig has called him "one in a century." But he is not western in any provincial or parochial sense; he has demonstrated that you can see as far from California or Montana as from anywhere.The first section of this book is at once intensely personal and broadly universal, from the search for the Big Strike by his father and the search for Home by the boy to the eloquent and poignant "Letter, Much Too Late" to his mother.The second section, "Habitat," is Stegner at his most caring and tough-minded, describing and defining the true West, reflecting its mythologies, and illuminating the considerations--aridity, avidity, space, movement, mountains, desert, boosterism, greed, and, always, water--that are part of its legacy. The visionaries and the short-sighted get their due here.And in part three, the author, among the most discerning of teachers and critics, expresses his admiration for such excellent (and often neglected) writers as Wendell Berry, George Stewart, Steinbeck, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark, in perceptive essays that reveal much about Wallace Stegner's values--and value--as well. Read Less