Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner

Simply put, one of my favorite books. A true master of the word and especially the short story. His style is so compelling and easy to read, and his depiction of the country and its inhabitants is haunting. In my opnion, he's right up there with Steinbeck, and he blows Hemingway away! Thank goodness we'll always have his work!

In his short stories, Wallace Stegner writes scenes and descriptions that come alive as if the reader were right there, looking and feeling and smelling the world of the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's, shaking hands with down-home people, making small talk and eating a home-cooked meal. In fact, they are so well written, his stories remind me of 3-D. When 3-D movies first came out people in the theaters screamed and ducked for cover as the characters on the big screen seemed to leap right out into the audience. They were that real. Well, that's the best way I can describe Wallace Stegner's writing. It's as real as it gets considering it's just words on a piece of paper. But those beautiful words leap right off the page. There are thirty-one stories in this book of which the author says came from his life. However, it's not an autobiography. He says he can't be trusted to write his biography. To quote, "I can't control my impulse to rearrange, suppress, add, heighten, invent, and improve." The result of all that creativity is some of the finest writing you'll ever come across. And that's not just my opinion. It's the opinion of those nice folks who gave him the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Of course, I always have to give a plug for Penguin Classic books. Love their style. This book is what Literature is all about. I give it five stars.

Perhaps the best story in the whole collection is another of Stegner's most well-known stories, The Sweetness Of The Twisted Apples. The story very simply and delicately limns the life and existence of one of the loneliest characters in American fiction, a young woman who lives at the end of a deserted country road, near an apple tree, whose only neighbor is a former lover who jilted her, after they were `goin' out.' The character is so beautifully realized that it almost seems that she's not human- but a ghost or angel. The tale ends with one of the most poignant scenes ever penned, as the girl looks off wistfully into the future: Wiping a brush, Ross turned his easy, warm smile on her. `How is it in the spring? Pretty?' It was surprising how responsive her wry little face was, `Oh, land just like a posy bed! It don't have very big apples any more, but it's a sight in the spring.' She stood with folded arms, as her mother has stood by the side of the car in the farmyard. Margaret, for all her watching, could find no trace of bitterness or frustration or anger in the girl. Starved as it was, the gnomish face was serene. `Springtime, we used to come up here most every night, when I was goin' out,' she said. It is with emotion that Stegner is at his best, which puts him at odds with the other great American writer whose name was Wallace Ste-, the poet Wallace Stevens, who was the epitome of mindly verse. When Stegner goes a bit too cerebral, or relies on plot machinations even his skills with description are not enough to stop the veer of the tale from heading downward. Yet, in character studies, like The Chink or The Volunteer, or some of the aforementioned stories, Stegner has few published peers. And, the tales range across the continent, from Canada (his homeland) to Utah, California to Vermont. Stegner loses his way in longer pieces, like the book's longest tale, Genesis, which follows the tough lives of Canadian cowboys at the turn of the Twentieth Century, through the eyes of a teenager named Rusty. The ranch they work on is owned by an absentee landlord who leaves the care of things all to hired hands. They herd on a ranch the size of a small nation. The story is about the risks they take to do their jobs in bringing the cattle in off the range for the winter. While this is a good set up, this is really a ten or fifteen page story, at most, not a novella, as the actions and characters' conversations get stale. At his best, when he is concise, and focuses on characters and emotions, Stegner is one of the best depicters of the human condition you can read. When he's not he's still passable, and it's often when a writer is at his worst that the best assessments can be made of his overall oeuvre. That being the case, Wallace Stegner rides high in the saddle.

When people ask who my favorite author is, Wallace Stegner is invariably one of the four or five names I toss out. And often I get the same response... "I've never read any Stegner" or even "I don't know the name". Stegner seems to be one of American literatures best kept secrets.These stories are an excellent introduction to Stegner, his style, and his ability to write vividly about life. A number of the stories in this collection were eventually incorporated as chapters in three of his novels: "The Big Rock Candy Mountain", "Recapitulation", and "Wolf Wilow".