"Anyone who reads is to some extent a citizen of the world." -- Wallace Stegner
Stegner's Pulitzer Prize winning novel was the subject of our February discussion, which also happened to be his 100th Birthday! This complex book has powerful and memorable characters and deals with several major themes: East vs West; Civilization vs Opportunity; Past vs Present; Exploiter vs Civilizer, Boomer vs Nester, and Old vs New. Stegner uses the narrator, Lyman Ward, to describe the lives of his grandparents Susan and Oliver Ward. The story of Susan Ward is based on the life of pioneer Mary Hallock Foote, whose personal correspondence Stegner had access to. In the lives of Stegner's characters, we get a sense of Stegner's passion for history, his interest in family roots, and what holds a family together as they experience conflict. The essence of the book is described beautifully in this quote: "I'm not writing a book of Western history.... I've written enough history books to know this isn't one. I'm writing about something else. A marriage, I guess.... What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I know them." A truly fantastic book that we can all highly recommend.
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