Mormon Country (Second Edition)

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Overview

Where others saw only sage, a salt lake, and a great desert, the Mormons saw their “lovely Deseret,” a land of lilacs, honeycombs, poplars, and fruit trees. Unwelcome in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, they migrated to the dry lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada to establish Mormon country, a wasteland made green. Like the land the Mormons settled, their habits stood in stark contrast to the frenzied recklessness of the American West. Opposed to the often prodigal individualism of the West, Mormons ...
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More About This Book

Overview

Where others saw only sage, a salt lake, and a great desert, the Mormons saw their “lovely Deseret,” a land of lilacs, honeycombs, poplars, and fruit trees. Unwelcome in Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois, they migrated to the dry lands between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada to establish Mormon country, a wasteland made green. Like the land the Mormons settled, their habits stood in stark contrast to the frenzied recklessness of the American West. Opposed to the often prodigal individualism of the West, Mormons lived in closely knit – some say ironclad – communities. The story of Mormon country is one of self-sacrifice and labor spent in the search for an ideal in the most forbidding territory of the American West. Richard W. Etulain provides a new introduction to this edition.
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Editorial Reviews

New York Times
“Stegner’s book makes excellent reading and is also solidly based. . . . His residence of fifteen years in the region he is describing allows him to mingle ease with authority.”—New York Times
Boston Globe
“Stegner combines a great amount of information and lively comment with fine description of one of the most beautiful and least known regions of the United States.”—Boston Globe
New York Times

“Stegner’s book makes excellent reading and is also solidly based. . . . His residence of fifteen years in the region he is describing allows him to mingle ease with authority.”—New York Times

Boston Globe

“Stegner combines a great amount of information and lively comment with fine description of one of the most beautiful and least known regions of the United States.”—Boston Globe

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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9780803293052
  • Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
  • Publication date: 9/28/2003
  • Edition description: Second Edition
  • Edition number: 2
  • Pages: 362
  • Sales rank: 585,169
  • Product dimensions: 5.32 (w) x 8.06 (h) x 0.78 (d)

Meet the Author

Wallace Stegner (1909–93) was one of America’s most distinguished novelists and essayists. His works include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose and The Spectator Bird, winner of the National Book Award. Richard W. Etulain is a professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico. He is the coauthor of The American West: A Twentieth-Century History (Nebraska 1989) and Stegner: Conversations on History and Literature.

Biography

Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa. The son of Scandinavian immigrants, he traveled with his parents and brother all over the West-to North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, and Wyoming-before settling in Salt Lake City in 1921. Many of the landscapes he encountered in his peripatetic youth figure largely in his work, as do characters based on his stern father and athletic, outgoing brother. Stegner received most of his education in Utah, graduating from the University in 1930. He furthered his education at the University of Iowa, where he received a master's and a doctoral degree. He married Mary Stuart Page in 1934, and for the next decade the couple followed Wallace's teaching career-to the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and eventually to Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program, and where he was to remain until his retirement in 1971. A number of his creative writing students have become some of today's most well respected writers, including Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurty.

Throughout his career and after, Stegner's literary output was tremendous. His first novel, Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937. By the time of his death in 1993 he had published some two dozen works of fiction, history, biography, and essays. Among his many literary prizes are the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971) and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976). His collection of essays, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award.

Although his fiction deals with many universal themes, Stegner is primarily recognized as a writer of the American West. Much of his literature deals with debunking myths of the West as a romantic country of heroes on horseback, and his passion for the terrain and its inhabitants have earned him the title "The Dean of Western Letters." He was one of the few true Men of Letters in this generation. An historian, essayist, short story writer and novelist, as well as a leading environmental writer. Although always connected in people's minds with the West, he had a long association with New England. Many short stories and one of his most successful novels, Crossing to Safety, are set in Vermont, where he had a summer home for many years. Another novel, The Spectator Bird, takes place in Denmark.

An early environmentalist, he actively championed the region's preservation and was instrumental-with his now-famous 'Wilderness Letter'-in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. Honest and straightforward, educated yet unpretentious, cantankerous yet compassionate, Wallace Stegner was an enormous presence in the American literary landscape, a man who wrote and lived with ferocity, energy, and integrity.

Author biography courtesy of Penguin Group (USA).

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    1. Also Known As:
      Wallace Earle Stegner (full name)
    1. Date of Birth:
      February 18, 1909
    2. Place of Birth:
      Lake Mills, Iowa
    1. Date of Death:
      April 13, 1993
    2. Place of Death:
      Santa Fe, New Mexico

Table of Contents

Meet Me at the Ward House 3
Mormon Trees 21
That Lieth Four-Square 25
The Land Nobody Wanted 33
Mud over Lyonesse 52
Forty Thousand Saints in One Act 57
And Nothing Shall Hinder or Stay Them 72
In Our Lovely Deseret 84
Shibboleth 100
Arcadian Village 108
Chief President of the Islands of the Sea 128
The Gathering-up of Zion 136
Myth and Legend 142
Lares and Penates 171
Family Reunion 182
Two Champions 187
Fossil Remains of an Idea 209
Looking Backward 227
Buenaventura and the Golden Shore 239
The Burg on the Bear 251
Fabulous Mountain 259
The Mexican in Minnie Number Two 269
The Wild Bunch 281
The Terrible River 293
Notes on a Life Spent Pecking at a Sandstone Cliff 302
Artist in Residence 319
The Home of Truth 331
The Last of the Sticks 344
Index 351
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