Marking the Sparrow's Fall:
Wallace Stegner's American West
Edited by Page Stegner
Henry Holt, $25
ISBN 0805044647

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Wallace Stegner, who died in 1993, is frequently referred to as the dean of the new American West writers. In the world of serious writers, the term "dean" can often be a form of damning with faint praise, meaning that one was an important early contributor to a movement but perhaps not its best example, not its apogee. Marking the Sparrow's Fall demonstrates that the term is both positive and deserved.

Edited by Stegner's son Page, this anthology defines what the North American West was and is with the mythology stripped away. It also proffers examples of the harsh, unromantic life of the cowboy who, in Stegner's view, is a poorly paid agricultural worker whose one inviolate dictum is that the well-being of his animals comes first. Stegner fought a lifelong battle with the myth of the American cowboy which, he admitted, he lost.

Stegner was not, however, a mere cowboy writer -- not by any means. Among his 30-some books are important works on conservation and the environment. Stegner's famous "Wilderness Letter" remains one of the environmental movement's most eloquent statements.

Stegner was also a teacher, an academic at some of the nation's best universities. After attending the University of Iowa, the site of America's finest creative writers' program, he founded the nation's second great writers' program at Stanford University. Among his students were Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Raymond Carver, and Edward Abbey to mention but a few. Abbey once called him "the only living American writer worthy of the Nobel."

Stegner's "colossal output" (as his son calls it) may be daunting to a reader new to his work. Where does the Stegner initiate start? Obviously, with Marking the Sparrow's Fall, which presents a fine cross section of essays, travel pieces, sketches, and fiction. And it concludes with one of the most powerful pieces of western realism to be found anywhere -- the chilling novella Genesis.

Writer, environmentalist, professor -- Wallace Stegner was all of these, but he was also a consummate westerner. All of these facets are represented in Marking the Sparrow's Fall.

Once a westerner himself, writer Jim Grinnell lives in DeKalb, Illinois.