Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West Paperback - 2002

First line

I had no understanding of it while it was happening, did not comprehend either the deprivations or the advantages until acquaintance with other regions and older cultures began to define the terms of my identity for me, but from February 1909, when I was born on my grandfather's farm near Lake Mills, Iowa, to September 1930, when I boarded a bus in Salt Lake City to go "back east" to graduate school in Iowa, all the places I knew were western: North Dakota wheat towns, Washington logging camps, Saskatchewan prairie hamlets and lonely homesteads, and the cities of Seattle, Great Falls, Salt Lake, Hollywood, and Reno, with a lot of country seen on the fly between them.

From the jacket flap

Nominated for a National Book Critics Circle award, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs gathers together Wallace Stegner's most important and memorable writings on the American West: its landscapes, diverse history, and shifting identity; its beauty, fragility, and power. With subjects ranging from the writer's own "migrant childhood" to the need to protect what remains of the great western wilderness (which Stegner dubs "the geography of hope") to poignant profiles of western writers such as John Steinbeck and Norman Maclean, this collection is a riveting testament to the power of place. At the same time it communicates vividly the sensibility and range of this most gifted of American writers, historians, and environmentalists.

Media reviews

“No one has written more or better about the West, past and present, than Wallace Stegner.”—USA Today