The great, wandering epic structure of The Big Rock Candy Mountain resembles that of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Each novel tries to capture the essence of its society while the main characters travel from place to place. Stegner himself compares his novel to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1865-1869), suggesting that each novel has a loose structure that allows for the coverage of large social issues.