David Guterson gained a reputation through his first two novels for poignant, elegiac prose, morally rooted subject matter, carefully researched details, and, perhaps most of all, a sense of place. Guterson considers himself a "traditional" novelist, and he often eschews the description of postmodern fiction writer in interviews. His first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars (1994), "runs counter to the post-modern spirit," as he told Ellen Kanner of BookPage (January 1996). Guterson suggests that "Post-modernism is dead because it didn't address human needs. The conventional story endures because it does." Guterson's embrace of the "traditional" story can be traced back to his university years, when he found himself particularly drawn to Russian writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, and Ivan Turgenev. He explained to Bill Donahue in a 2000 interview for Book magazine that "stories will always matter--stories that present human beings in crisis, deciding how to confront their struggles...