One of my all-time favorite books of essays is truly a gem, especially when it comes to a camping trip.

This collection of essays offers a diverse range of perspectives and experiences that can enhance the entire camping adventure.

The words within its pages have the power to transport you to different landscapes and mindsets, making you feel as if you are right there in the midst of the action.

Whether it's reading about the beauty of nature, the simplicity of life in the great outdoors, or the lessons learned from facing challenges while camping, each essay provides valuable insights and inspiration.

It's like having a trusted companion by your side, sharing stories and wisdom that can make your camping trip even more memorable and meaningful.

I highly recommend this book of essays to anyone who loves camping or simply enjoys exploring the written word.

It's sure to become a cherished part of your camping gear and a source of joy and enlightenment for many adventures to come.

What a joy it was to read my first piece of Stegner fiction. I was inspired by my love for "Crossing to Safety", and what a perfect transition it was.

This collection of essays offers a clear glimpse into Stegner's fascinating mind and life. As I absorbed his ruminations on life, I couldn't help but think that Wallace would die in a car accident in New Mexico just a few years later.

The first few essays are Wallace's most personal. My favorite in the whole book was "Letter, Much Too Late", in which Wallace writes to his mother who passed away 50 years ago, when he was only 25. Wallace describes himself as being self-obsessed during the 25 years he shared with his mom, which made me wonder about the regrets I'll have one day for the way I used my attention during these glorious days. I was on the verge of tears as the essay closed with Wallace's observation that soon he will die too: "Any minute now I will hear you singing."

The middle part is a long collection of essays on the beauty of the American West and the threat of man to destroy that beauty. It gave me a greater appreciation for the time I'm spending out West and helped me notice the beauty of the dry, golden rolling hills of California on our drive home. Admittedly, by the end of this collection, I did get a bit tired of the beauty of the environment.

The end consists of a few essays where Wallace writes to and about other writers he respects and has some sort of relationship with. His essay about George Stewart made me want to read "Names on the Land." I also deeply enjoyed the personal touch of his writing to his student, "A Letter to Wendell Berry." His distinction between respecting someone for their accomplishments and respecting someone for who they are and their values is both profound and useful.

One more quote that struck me, this one about truth, from the very end of the book: "Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true."

Favorite quotes from Where the Blue Sings to the Lemonade Springs:

And yet there is something to the notion of western independence. There is something about living in a big empty space, where people are few and distant, under a great sky that is alternately serene and furious. Exposed to the sun from four in the morning till nine at night, and to a wind that never seems to rest, there is something about this exposure to that big country. It not only tells an individual how small he is, but steadily tells him who he is. I have never understood identity problems. Any time when I lay awake at night and heard the wind in the screens and saw the moon ride up the sky, or sat reading in the shade of the shack and heard the wind moan and mourn around the corners, or slept out under the wagon and felt it searching among the spokes of the wheels, I knew well enough who, or what, I was, even if I didn't matter. As surely as any pullet in the yard, I was a target, and I had better respect what had me in its sights.

Between my twelfth and twenty-first years, we must have lived in twenty different houses. And we never again became, as we had been in Eastend, a family with an attic and a growing accumulation of memorabilia, worn-out life gear, and the artifacts of memory.

Age and experience have not made me a Nestor qualified to tell others about how to live their lives. I feel more like Theodore Dreiser, who confessed that he would depart from life more bewildered than he had arrived in it. Instead of being embittered, stoical, calm, resigned, or any of the standard things that a long life might have made me, I confess that I am often simply lost, as much in need of comfort, understanding, forgiveness, uncritical love - the things you used to give me - as I ever was at five, or ten, or fifteen.

Obviously you did not die. Death is a convention, a certification to the end of pain, something for the vital-statistics book, not binding upon anyone but the keepers of graveyard records. For as I sit here at the desk, trying to tell you something fifty-five years too late, I have a clear mental image of your pursed lips and your crinkling eyes, and I know that nothing I can say will persuade you that I was ever less than you thought me. Your kind of love, once given, is never lost. You are alive and luminous in my head. Except when I fail to listen, you will speak through me when I face some crisis of feeling or sympathy or consideration for others. You are a curb on my natural impatience and competitiveness and arrogance. When I have been less than myself, you make me ashamed even as you forgive me.

The principal invention of western American culture is the motel, the principal exhibit of that culture the automotive roadside. A principal western industry is tourism, which exploits the mobile and the seasonal. Whatever it might be, the West is still primarily a series of brief visitations or a trail to somewhere else. And western literature, from Roughing It to On the Road, from The Log of a Cowboy to Lonesome Dove, from The Big Rock Candy Mountain to The Big Sky, has been largely a literature not of place but of motion.

They [typical western towns] look at once lost and self-sufficient, scruffy and indispensable. A road leads in out of wide emptiness, threads a fringe of service stations, taverns, and a motel or two, widens to a couple of blocks of commercial buildings, some still false-fronted, with glimpses of side streets and green lawns, narrows to another strip of automotive roadside, and disappears into more wide emptiness.

We are not so far from our models, real and fictional, as we think. As on a wild river, the water passes, the waves remain. A high degree of mobility, a degree of ruthlessness, a large component of both self-sufficiency and self-righteousness, mark the historical pioneer, the lone-riding folk hero, and the modern businessman intent on opening new industrial frontiers and getting his own in the process. One reason why it is so difficult to isolate any definitely western culture is that so many Westerners, like other Americans only more so, shy away from commitment. Mobility of every sort - physical, familial, social, corporate, occupational, religious, sexual - confirms and reinforces the illusion of independence.

Even without devils, the struggle to survive fully occupied the first generation or two. And survival meant, in man's version of God's word, "subduing" the wild earth. Nobody questioned the value of that effort. Civilization was a good; wilderness was what had to be subdued to create the human habitations that looked like progress and triumph even when they were only huts in a stump field.

To the boosters, America was always "prosperous" farms, "smiling" villages, "bustling" towns. But life on the frontier was more often crude and brutal and deprived. Crévecoeur painted a rosy picture of the established farm and the self-reliant industrious farmer. But he had to admit that out on the edge, beyond the settlements, were those surly, verminous men who lived in dirt-floored cabins with slattern wives and broods of dirty children, sustaining themselves by constant killing of animals and growing even gloomier and more antisocial by the eating of wild meat. Crévecoeur thought that as settlement caught up with them they would gradually grow out of their barbarous stage and join the ranks of the happy, prosperous, and civilized.

Maybe some of them did. Maybe some just went farther west when the settlements caught up. No matter which they did, the frontiersman was being built by the popular imagination into an idealized archetypical figure, divorced from Europe, divorced from history, homegrown, a demigod in buckskin. His real-life prototype was Daniel Boone. His larger-than-life fictional version was James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo, "Leatherstocking," who appeared in the novel The Pioneers in 1823 and whose story continued in other novels in the 1840s.

Others [real cowboys], I am sure, are trying to do what any writer is trying to do: render the texture and tensions of their own lives, their own occupation, their own place.

So I must believe that, at least to human perceptions, a place is not a place until people have been born in it, have grown up in it, lived in it, known it, died in it - have both experienced and shaped it, as individuals, families, neighborhoods, and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef.

Indifferent to, or contemptuous of, or afraid to commit ourselves to, our physical and social surroundings, always hopeful of something better, hooked on change, a lot of us have never stayed in one place long enough to learn it, or have learned it only to leave it.

Some writers want to expose themselves, some to disguise themselves, some to efface themselves. Some who appear to expose themselves are distorting themselves for reasons of their own. There is more than one way to impose order on your personal chaos. But since good writers write what is important to them, they are bound to be in there somewhere, as participants or observers or ombudsmen.

The guts of any significant fiction - or autobiography - is an anguished question. The true art of fiction, in which I include autobiography, involves putting that question within a plausible context of order.

When we invent fictional characters, as when we invent gods, we often invent them in our own image: we create the unknown out of the materials of the known. The worlds that novelists create, even the fantasy worlds of space and backward or forward time, are made out of the details of the world we were born into. Invention and method fuse here.

Back where we began. How to write a story, though ignorant or baffled. You take something that is important to you, something you have brooded about. You try to see it as clearly as you can, to fix it in a transferable equivalent. All you want in the finished print is the clean statement of the lens, which is yourself, on the subject that has been absorbing your attention. Sure, it's autobiography. Sure, it's fiction. Either way, if you have done it right, it's true.

As someone who was born in the west and has a very clear understanding of the troublesome history of this nation and its various regions, especially the west, I have a deep affection for this book.

I simply can't help it, nor do I feel the need to apologize for it. The author's word choices are so rich, which is not commonly seen in modern American writing.

Each word seems to be carefully selected to convey the intended meaning with precision and nuance.

This collection of works truly offers a unique reading experience.

I thoroughly enjoyed every page, immersing myself in the vivid descriptions and engaging stories.

It has allowed me to gain a deeper appreciation for the history and culture of the west, and has left a lasting impression on me.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in American history, literature, or simply a good read.

Stegner is my all-time favorite author. I have a deep affection for his works. His novels are truly my favorites. They have the power to transport me to different worlds and make me engage with the characters on a profound level. However, I also really enjoyed this collection of essays and writings. It provided a different perspective into his thoughts and ideas. The reason I gave it 4 stars is simply because I have a stronger preference for his fictional writing. I find the fictional stories more captivating and immersive. They allow my imagination to run wild. But this collection of essays and writings is still a great addition to his body of work and well worth reading.

Aridity, more than anything else, gives the western landscape its character.

The unifying theme of all of these excellent essays and letters is love for the American West. It is the real American West, not the romanticized cowboys and saloons west of popular fiction.

Earlier in his career, Wallace Stegner famously called the West "the geography of hope", a proclamation that he spends a great deal of time in these essays qualifying or even refuting. He distinguishes between the "stickers" and the "boosters". The former belong to the land and cherish it deeply, while the latter aim to conquer and exploit it. Stegner clearly loves the land he is writing about, but he loves it for what it is and resents those who attempt to transform it into something it cannot be.

"You have to get over the color green; you have to stop associating beauty solely with gardens and lawns; you have to become accustomed to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

Best of all is Stegner's final essay in the collection, The Law of Nature and the Dream of Man. It is an artist's exploration of why writing and reading fiction hold value and how to make it meaningful. "The essence of any significant fiction [...] is an anguished question." Stegner believes that good fiction should assist both the reader and the writer in making sense of a perplexing world, and his thoughts in this essay have helped me better envision the kind of reader I aspire to be.

On the cover of my edition of this book is this quote from USA Today: "No one has written more or better about the West, past and present, than Wallace Stegner." Indeed, it seems quite accurate.

A Love Letter to the West

The West has always held a special allure, captivating the hearts and minds of countless individuals. It is a land that evokes the spirit of great thinkers and adventurers like John Muir, who was awestruck by its beauty. His words and writings have inspired generations to appreciate and protect the natural wonders of the West.

Aldo Leopold, another influential figure, advocated for conservation. He understood the delicate balance of nature and the importance of preserving it for future generations. His ideas have shaped our approach to environmental stewardship in the West.

And then there's Edward Abbey, with his bold and unapologetic attitude. His famous quote, "get out and stay out, you losers!" challenges us to break free from the constraints of modern society and embrace the wildness of the West.

The West is a place of dreams and aspirations, a land that calls to us on a deep and primal level. It is a place where we can find solitude, inspiration, and a sense of connection with something greater than ourselves. In this love letter to the West, we celebrate its beauty, its history, and its spirit. We honor the legacies of those who have come before us and look forward to the adventures that lie ahead.

Whether we are hiking in the mountains, camping under the stars, or simply taking in the view, the West has the power to transform us. It is a place that will always hold a special place in our hearts.

Wallace Stegner is truly a remarkable writer and a deeply thoughtful individual.

His extensive collection of essays about the west holds a profound truth on multiple levels for those of us who reside here.

It is the personal essays that I find the most captivating – take, for instance, his touching tribute to his long-departed mother.

I am constantly astonished when people are unfamiliar with this incredible man.

He passed away in 1993, and what a great loss that was to literature, the west, and the entire world.

Stegner's works have left an indelible mark, offering insights into the west's history, culture, and the human experience.

His ability to bring the west to life through his words is truly remarkable.

Whether it's描绘 the vast landscapes or exploring the complex emotions of the people who inhabit this region, Stegner's writing is both engaging and thought-provoking.

His contributions will continue to be cherished and studied for generations to come.

All the education you need!!

Education is the key to unlocking a world of opportunities and personal growth. It equips us with the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to navigate through life's challenges and achieve our goals. Whether it's formal education in a school or university, or informal learning through experiences and self-study, every form of education has its own significance.

In today's rapidly changing world, it is essential to have a continuous thirst for learning. We should not limit ourselves to the education we receive during our formative years but should strive to learn new things throughout our lives. This could involve taking up new hobbies, attending workshops and seminars, or even pursuing further studies in a particular field of interest.

Moreover, education is not just about academic achievements. It also plays a crucial role in shaping our character, developing our social skills, and enhancing our creativity. A well-rounded education helps us to become more empathetic, understanding, and responsible individuals, capable of making a positive impact on society.

In conclusion, all the education we need is not just about acquiring knowledge but also about becoming better human beings. We should embrace every opportunity to learn and grow, and use our education to make a difference in the world around us.

This is Stegner's final book, and it is truly an outstanding collection of essays.

These essays cover a wide range of topics, including life, the West, writers, and writing. What Stegner has to say about literature and good writing closely aligns with my own feelings on the subject. He believes that writers should draw from their own experiences and express themselves in their unique way, not being confined by someone else's idea of method. As he so beautifully puts it, "What literature is supposed to be...at its best is a bolt of lightning from me to you, a flash of recognition and feeling within the context of a shared culture."

One particularly moving chapter is "Letter, Much Too Late." In this chapter, Stegner writes a touching and poignant letter to his mother when he is nearly eighty years old, even though she has been deceased for 55 years. In other chapters, he delights in the achievements and books of contemporary authors and provides brief critiques of several of these works. In yet another chapter, he writes about the West from a conservationist perspective, asserting that "we simply need wild country for reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures and as part of the geography of hope."

Stegner came from a dysfunctional background, with his father constantly moving the family from one broken promise to another. However, his determination for education and his mother's love (she passed away when he was a graduate student, and his father committed suicide shortly after) allowed him to break free from this troubled existence. Learning was his only way out, and he applied himself so successfully that he is sometimes referred to as the "Dean of Western Writers," although that title may be a bit limiting.

Stegner writes with clarity, grace, and amazing insight into our humanity, straddling the line between despair and true hope. His words have the power to touch our hearts and make us think deeply about the world around us.

This book is a compilation of essays that delves into the conditions and circumstances which served as the bedrock for the settlement of the Midwest and later the Western United States. It examines these aspects from the vantage points of climate and geography first, and then explores how they influenced the culture.

Due to the arid climate, certain ways of life emerged on widely dispersed homesteads. This compelled individuals to be multi-skilled and self-reliant, eventually giving rise to the "mythic" cowboy culture, which doesn't accurately represent the actual lives of real cowboys. As areas that initially appeared fertile deteriorated, families relocated frequently, transforming into a mobile culture rather than settled communities with a sense of place and belonging. With migration flowing in from the East, with Europe as a reference, adapting to the land (beyond the 98th meridian) was especially challenging due to the scarcity of water.

This collection, which was published in 1992, remains highly relevant today, perhaps even more so. It should be seriously considered for assignment to those who are accountable for climate policy and action in the present day.

It offers valuable insights into the complex interplay between climate, geography, and culture, and can serve as a useful guide for formulating effective strategies to address contemporary climate issues.

Stegner's writing truly resonates with me as I am also a Westerner. I have an inherent need for the vast open space that the West offers. The smell of sagebrush after an early winter rain is like a magical fragrance that lingers in my memory. It is a scent that evokes a sense of peace and connection with nature. In this modern world, we are often surrounded by the trappings of civilization, especially in dense populated spaces. However, I long for a simpler life, one where the only complications are those that I bring upon myself. I yearn for the freedom and tranquility that can only be found in the wide-open West. Stegner's words capture this essence perfectly, making me feel understood and validated in my desires.