Throughout his career and after, Stegner's literary output was tremendous. His first novel, Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937. By the time of his death in 1993 he had published some two dozen works of fiction, history, biography, and essays. Among his many literary prizes are the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971) and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976). His collection of essays, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award.

Although his fiction deals with many universal themes, Stegner is primarily recognized as a writer of the American West. Much of his literature deals with debunking myths of the West as a romantic country of heroes on horseback, and his passion for the terrain and its inhabitants have earned him the title 'The Dean of Western Letters'. He was one of the few true Men of Letters in this generation. An historian, essayist, short story writer and novelist, as well as a leading environmental writer. Although always connected in people's minds with the West, he had a long association with New England. Many short stories and one of his most successful novels, Crossing to Safety, are set in Vermont, where he had a summer home for many years. Another novel, The Spectator Bird, takes place in Denmark.

An early environmentalist, he actively championed the region's preservation and was instrumental-with his now-famous 'Wilderness Letter'-in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. Honest and straightforward, educated yet unpretentious, cantankerous yet compassionate, Wallace Stegner was an enormous presence in the American literary landscape, a man who wrote and lived with ferocity, energy, and integrity.

Page Stegner is a Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

I. The Question Mark in the Circle
1. The Question Mark in the Circle
2. History Is a Pontoon Bridge
3. The Dump Ground

II. Preparation for a Civilization
1. First Look
2. The Divide
3. Horse and Gun
4. Half World: The Metis
5. Company of Adventurers
6. Last of the Exterminators
7. The Medicine Line
8. Law in a Red Coat
9. Capital of an Unremembered Past

III. The Whitemud River Range
1. Specification for a Hero
2. Genesis
3. Carrion Spring

IV. Town and Country
1. The Town Builders
2. Whitemud, Saskatchewan
3. The Garden of the World
4. The Making of Paths

Epilogue: False-Front Athens
Acknowledgments