Near the end of the essay "Leaving," collected in Owning It All: Essays (1987), William Kittredge writes, "On the day after Thanksgiving in 1965, when I was thirty-three years old, I started trying to write stories." Up to this time, he had followed a conventional path that should have kept him connected with at least one standard version of the American dream, but when he left the family ranch in southeastern Oregon in 1967 to pursue a degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, he set out in a different direction. Although his career as a writer did not begin until he was in his mid thirties, Kittredge has been both prolific and versatile, and he has maintained a close identity with his Oregon roots while expanding his regional perspective by establishing his home and life in Montana. Now retired from nearly thirty years of teaching at...