Wallace Stegner, Marking the Sparrow's Fall ****

Wallace Stegner's great strength as a writer is his ability to describe landscapes, cultures, and history in terms that are vividly particular but also clearly related to a general thesis. He writes primarily about the American West, defined as everything west of the 100th meridian of longitude, which runs through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. This definition is not arbitrary but rather represents "the isohyetal line of twenty inches, beyond which the annual rainfall is less than the twenty inches normally necessary for unirrigated crops." In the course of these essays, Stegner shows how this one fact explains the distinctive flavor of the West, not just its topography but also its history, its politics, and its values.

The other key element that Stegner identifies is land. In "The Twilight of Self-Reliance," he provides a capsule history of the United States based on the premise that American values formed largely in response to the availability of free land in the New World, at a time when all land in Europe was claimed and held tightly. Much of our modern malaise began around the beginning of the 19th century when we exhausted the available land and our values no longer matched our society.

Put these two factors together –– low rainfall and the perceived value of working the land –– and you can see how the modern West was formed. Protecting watersheds becomes critical, lots of land can seem worthless for agriculture or indeed any productive use, resources are exploited in a boom then abandoned. Over 80% of Nevada is federal land.

I've read three other Stegner books, each of which I recommend strongly. Wolf Willow is a memoir of his childhood on a homestead in Saskatchewan. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a biography of John Wesley Powell. Angle of Repose is a novel about a woman in the mining camps of Leadville Colorado. (I believe I read another of his novels, The Spectator Bird, but it has flown from my memory.)

Marking the Sparrow's Fall ends with a novella about cattlemen on the Saskatchewan prairie during the brutal winter of 1906. It is an immersive adventure story.