Thursday, February 19, 2009

Read this Book.


Wallace Stegner is perhaps the greatest writer of the west, and some would say, most prolific, by any measure, of the twentieth century. He was a biographer, writer of fiction, non-fiction, essayist, and an original conservationist. He took the lone gun man myth out of the west and wrote about the communities and land of the worlds last frontier. A non mormon outsider who adopted Salt Lake City as his second home, Stegner has a deep respect for the people and places that were so wonderfully strange to him. I relate so much to him, as I read his words, it is sometimes scary. His writing is endlessly quotable and quietly funny. The Big Rock Candy Mountain is the first of his writings I have read and I think it gives a real look on what it means to live in and appreciatiate the west.

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