Marking the Sparrow's Fall: The Making of the American West

Marking the Sparrow's Fall is Wallace Stegner's biggest collection and the first since his death. His son, Page, has selected fifteen essays that have never before been published in any book and placed them alongside Wallace Stegner's most powerful pieces in the book's three nonfiction parts: Home Ground (memory), Testimony (defense of the earth), and Inheritance (history). The fourth section of the book is devoted to a magnificent little-known novella, "Genesis". As Page Stegner writes of the collection, "It is as complete and comprehensive a statement as we are ever likely to have about what it means to be a westerner, about what it means to know ourselves as 'a part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.'"