The Sound of Mountain Water The Changing American West

A book of timeless importance about the American West and a modern classic by National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning Wallace Stegner. 

The essays, memoirs, letters, and speeches collected in The Sound of Mountain Water encompass memoir, nature conservation, history, geography, and literature. Compositions delve into the post-World War II boom that brought the Rocky Mountain West--from Montana and Idaho to Utah and Nevada--into the modern age. Other works feature eloquent sketches of the West's history and environment, directing our imagination to the sublime beauty of such places as Robbers Roost and Glen Canyon. A final section examines the state of Western literature, of the mythical past and the diminished present, and analyzesd the difficulties facing any contemporary Western writer. 

Written over a period of twenty-five years, a time in which the West witnessed rapid changes to its cultural and natural heritage, and by a writer and thinker who will always hold a unique position in modern American letters, The Sound of Mountain Water is a hymn to the Western landscape, an affirmation of the hope emobided therein, and a careful and rich investigation of the West's complex legacy.

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.

Introduction

Part I

1  Overture: The Sound of Mountain Water
2  The Rediscovery of America: 1946
3  Packhorse Paradise
4  Navajo Rodeo
5  San Juan and Glen Canyon
6  Glen Canyon Submersus
7  The Land of Enchantment
8  Coda:  Wilderness Letter

Part II

1  At Home in the Fields of the Lord
2  Born a Square
3  History, Myth,a nd the Western Writer
4  On the Writing of History
5  Three Samples:
    a The West Synthetic:  Bret Harte
    b The West Authentic:  Willa Cather
    c The West Emphatic:  Bernard DeVoto
6  The Book and the Great Community