Wallace Stegner has had a productive, distinguished career as a writer of novels, short stories, and nonfiction. His novels are realistic in manner and almost invariably set in the western United States. Yet his primary interest is not in places as such, although he renders them with extraordinary skill. Place means feeling for Stegner; his main region is the human spirit.

Stegner's novels have received much critical acclaim and several prizes, including a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971) and a 1977 National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976). At least two, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943) and Angle of Repose, exhibit the range, virtuosity, depth, and power of the finest fiction. Each explores a question central in Stegner's life and in American culture: How does one achieve a sense of identity, permanence, and civilization--a sense of home--in a place where rootlessness and discontinuity dominate"

Like three writers who...