Every once in a while you happen upon a novel where you know you'll never forget the experience of reading those words. You know you'll never forget the characters. You know you'll never forget the lessons it taught you. You know that no matter how many books you read in your life, there won't be more than a handful to come close to it. All the Little Living Things is certainly one of those few.

All the Little Living Things is one of the finest novels I have ever read. I will not go into the plot because other reviewers have done so very well (read Paul McGrath's review; it's far better than mine), but I will say that it is immensely readable. Everything that happens in the novel happens because of the character's actions or thoughts. Nothing is contrived. Reading the story truly is a physical, not just a mental exercise, and you are exausted after finishing the novel. The prose is also superb. This is the third novel I've read by Wallace Stegner, and I don't know how many pages I have written down of quotes from the novels that I want to remember. The greatest thing about this novel is most definitely the characters, though. Joe Allston, who is also the main character of The Spectator Bird, is singularly the most complex character I've read in literature. You know everything about him, every aspect of his character. The supporting characters are superb too. They take on many dimensions. This novel thrives on the insights Joe gains from just being around these people. It is amazing to see Joe change: to see him learn about his relationship with people of a younger genteration, to see him learn that he can't escape life, and to see beauty in all aspects of life. It is amazing to learn with Joe.

All the Little Living Things really is a marvelous novel. I really cannot express how great it is. It is a masterpiece of twentieth century American literature, and I think that Wallace Stegner is without a doubt the greatest American novelist yet.

If you don't know Stegner, the title might suggest another pious paean to furry critters and cutesy pets. But Stegner is too much the hard-minded analyst for that. Not at all cold, mind you. This is a supremely pasionate writer. Stegner is the novelist who redeems absolutely the humanity of the Grump. The main character is keenly aware of his flaws, stodginess, and resistance to change, and he agonizes over the conflict between his values of hard work, self-critique, and acceptance of the amorality (read cruelty) of life, and the fuzzy standards of an encroaching young back-to-nature set. There is an amazing love story at the heart of this book--of the avuncular grouch for a young dying mother--so well written it will teach even those who have never been in love what it is to revere the divine in another human being. The dark irony of Stegner's title plays its many levels around and within the woman he loves.

It is amazing to find an author like Stegner whose richness of human understanding increases with his age, while his students like Ken Kesey were such a brilliant and brief flash of light. I found this novel to be among his best -- my other two favorites are Crossing to Safety and Angle of Repose. And like those works this piece stacks full of question and thought and answer, without being pious. This, I think, is his first great novel, and it isn't matched until years later with Angle of Repose (and is much more profound and impactful than its sequel Spectator Bird). His age and wisdom, best described as an openness to the human condition, reminds one of his mortality, of his anger towards that awful reality, while in the same instant one celebrates the beauty and bewilderment of life its self as experineced through Stegner's eyes. A must read. Whenever I feel estranged, a good Wallace Stegner book like this always reminds me that I am not alone, and that is not a feat easily done.

Wallace Stegner has the ability to create wonderful, human characters. I felt like I knew the people he wrote about. And, because their experiences are so honest, the reader is able to accept that all dimensions of life including human fraility, are part of the complex wonder of life. I didn't want this book to end.

This is a beautiful book. It's about life and all the small things that make life enjoyable and worth living. There isn't much action yet I found myself utterly concerned with the lives of the characters. I relish every chance I get to recommend this book to people who have never read it.

Jackson J. Benson has in this volume produced a superb literary biography of one of America's most underrated writers. The book in many ways reflects some of Stegner's own qualities as a writer. Stegner, in his biography of John Wesley Powell, BEYOND THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN, emphasized that it was a biography of his professional, not personal, life. Although Benson does not neglect Stegner's personal life, the stress is very definitely upon his literary, academic, and environmental work. Benson does let us get to know Stegner the person, with his own quirks (he dislike of the sixties and youth counterculture, his love of Vermont, his avoidance of extremism, his love of community as opposed to rugged individualism), but unlike many modern biographers, he is not intent upon baring Stegner's inner life, warts and all. Benson, like Stegner, strives towards balance. In this he succeeds admirably.

Stegner vividly emerges in this biography as a profoundly principled, disciplined, committed, and morally courageous individual. The product of an impoverished childhood, later recounted fictionally in his semi-autobiographical novel THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN, Benson chronicles Stegner's drive to become a writer. In a sense, the book covers an uneventful life. Stegner did not do a great deal beyond write, teach, and speak out on a variety of environmental issues. Benson explores his friendships with mentors such as Bernard DeVoto and Robert Frost, to friends both famous and unknown, to students such as Ernest Gaines, Wendell Berry, and Ken Kesey.

Although primarily focused on Stegner's literary output as both a fiction writer and historian, Benson deals extensively with Stegner's work as a conservationist. Of all the major writers of the past century, Stegner almost certainly was more involved in environmental causes than any other. He did this not only through his writing, such as in his great biography of John Wesley Powell, but in his activities as part of the Sierra Club and in numerous environmental efforts, including working briefly as an advisor to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.

Most of all, this book created a portrait of a writer and human being worthy of respect. Stegner emerges as a good man, someone the reader would have enjoyed knowing. At this point in time, I have read only Stegner's book on Powell and ANGLE OF REPOSE, but between those two books and this excellent biography make me want to read a great deal more.

Wallace Stegner wrote about ordinary people trying to make sense of day-to-day existence. He wrote with an extraordinary clarity of description and dialogue that is best matched by the clear, keen air of the Western high country where he grew up. The reader will find no hyperbole in his books and no gratuitous violence or sex. He or she will find sorrow there and the ways of handling it that humans use to try to make sense of it. His books are explorations of the canyon lands of sorrow and of the ascent to the connections with other humans that require the forgiveness that makes our best solace in the face of regret. Professor Benson senses these themes and uses them as organizing principles in presenting Stegner's works as they map his life. The book is balanced in its presentations with no room for heroes, anti-heroes or villains of the stock variety, a reflection of both the author's scholarship and his subject's own approach to characterization. Jackson Benson's book, too, is the harvest of ten years research done carefully, using many contemporary sources including interviews with Wallace Stegner himself before his premature death after an auto accident in 1993. Professor Benson's writing style is fluid, clean and selfless as he gives us a portrait of a man who chronicled changes in America between the last of the frontier cowboys and the invention of cyberspace. It is the picture of a writer of the American West whose themes apply equally well anywhere on the globe that humans inhabit. This book is a fine introduction to Stegner's work for those who have never read him and a delightful comment, containing both criticism and appreciation, for those who have read Wallace Stegner and will enjoy a conversation with another, most astute, reader. It is another dip into the complexity of Wallace Stegner's fiction, essays and biographies and into the meaning in them that can be described as their author once described mountain streams: always running, always there. by Thomas Beresford, M.D., University of Colorado Health Sciences Center

This is an amazing book with quotes and images.

Of all the authors I have read, few evoke such good feelings as Wallace Stegner. It's a shame that he was killed in a car crash in the early 1990s. I think he was just getting warmed up and he certainly had decades of experience yet to share with us. This collection of stories, like his novels, shows the conflicts of the human soul. Stegner liked to write about young boys coming of age in an often thoughtless society (and family). And, as you will learn by reading Jackson Benson's biography of him, Stegner had an autobiographical bent while writing his fiction. The locales of his stories resemble those places where his gambling, drinking father took him and his family in the early 1900s. It seems that Stegner was obsessed with his father, and many of his stories feature a version of him. He and his father had a rather poor relationship and Stegner's writing about him perhaps was his effort at catharsis. My favorite story in this collection is Goin' to Town. The expectations of this poor boy are shot to .... and he is left to endure the boredom of yet another day. Excellent stories, excellent writer.

The cover photograph was only the first of many outstanding pictures in this book. The photographs are by Jim Dutcher, who provided most of the source material for the book. Most of the text was written by Karen McCall, rich with description almost to the point of being a distraction at times, but there are a few parts where there is a noticeable shift in style, and I suspect these were written by Dutcher himself. We get the story of Catrina as she raises three cubs in an enclosure in a secluded area, to be eventually released into the wild (Catrina herself is too acclimated to humans to be released). Their story is interesting and compelling. The book is worth having for the pictures alone, but you'll be missing out if you don't read the text too.

I've listened to a borrowed copy of this book twice. I like it better than anything else I've ready by Wallace Stegner -- except for his few other stories on the same subject: The early 1900s on the open range in Alberta. Page Stegner's voice is perfect for this book. I've decided that audio books have to be largely poetic to be enjoyable and this one is. Like Raymond Chandler, Stegner knows how to turn a phrase; unlike Chandler, he tells a story you can follow without having to make a big effort at concentration. I know I'll want to hear it again and again.

This was an execellent learning tool to introduce my 9th grade homeschooler to great works in literature. After reading this book he started reading more of the classic novels.

I have read The Big Sky three times, and scanned it many more. Having grown up in Browning, MT, this book really takes me home. What sets Guthrie's work apart from other writers of the mountain man genre, is character development. The way characters like Jim Deakins, and Boone Caudill, and Dick Summers, become complete people, is uncanny. The internal dialogues each carry on is fascinating. Jim's thoughts about god are succinct, and( I feel) right on the money. Boone Caudill is a misfit in any society, and the only way he could possibly live and let live, is utterly on his own. He becomes "broody" when in the company of others, and is nowhere near likable. His demeanor is completely opposed to that of Jim Deakins, who is carefree, and refuses to take anything too seriously. Boone's words, upon their meeting, "A man would have to be willing to stand by his partner, come whatever" (a paraphrase), turn out to be very ironic. Dick Summers is really the main character, as his saga continues through "The Way West", and "Fair Land, Fair Land". He is the balance between the two, and the glue that holds the partnership together. This book chronicles the heyday of the fur trade, and signals the end of that era, and the open west. I'd highly recommend it to anyone, be it for it's accurate descriptions of the time, or it's sociological implications. It is not just another mountain man story.

The Big Sky, by A.B Guthrie,tells the too-real-to-be-fiction story of Boone Caudill, Jim Deakins, and Dick Summers. The great description of the area, Northwestern Montana, is 100% accuate, from the indian tribes found in the region, to the local dialects of the men. Guthrie wrote this story as if he were actually in the place of the men, and if everything actually took place in the story. Boone is the stereotypical "mountain man" of the story, the rough, rugged, hard nosed hero. His best friend, Jim Deakins, is the anti-Boone character. Jim can also be considered a mountain man, but his personality is completly different then Boone's. Throughout the book, the characters come to life, where the reader becomes concerned and scared for Boone, Jim, and Dick through their trials. The tone almost throughout the entire story is Paranoia. Thsi is true, because Boone and Jim start to realize their paradise in Montana is becoming new stomping ground for people coming west to settle. Boone then becomes paranoid of people around him, where he finally isolates himself in the woods, with no human contact beside a few blackfeet indians. Boone also becomes weary of staying inside a house, or any space where he is not outside in the free land. He becomes depresed if he is taken out of his habitat for a great period of time, perhaps because he is paranoid that he won't be able to stay in nature any longer if he is stuck outside it. This becomes clear when his father dies, and he travels back to Kentucky. He describes his feelings of Kentucky as follows "He had felt at home outdoors. It was as if the land and sky and wind were friendly, and no need for a pack of people about to make him easy. The wind had a voice to it, and the land lay ready for him, and the sky gave room for his eye and mind. But now he felt different, cramped by the forest that rose thick as grass over him, shutting out the sun and letting him see only a piece of sky now and then, and it faded and closed down like a roof. THe wind was dead here, not even the leaves of the grat poplars, rising high over all the rest, so much as trembled. It was a still, closed-in, broody world, and a man in it went empty and lost inside, as if all that he had counted on was taken away, and he without a friend or an aim or a proper place anywhere."(page 357) Overall, this book is a great book if you love reading a passionate story about a man and his one true love, nature. Boone represents the man with the call of the wild in his soul, and his struggle to keep what he has while he can. Living in Montana, this book is also an interesting story that depicts the lives of people living where I now call home in the 1830's.

I first read this book when I was 14 or 15 years old and it lead to a lifelong interest in the fur trade era and the history of western expansion. I have re-read it several times since and continue to be amazed by it's power. Guthrie's love of the land about which he writes is obvious. His writing is perhaps the most evocative of place that I have ever read. I have never been to the plains or the Rockies, yet from reading this book I have come to feel as though I knew these places when they were still wild. His characters are real and believable people, with strengths and weaknesses and distinctly different personalities. Dick Summers in particular stands out in his humanity - a strong character with a gentle and compassionate side. Guthrie has also obviously studied the details of the mountain man's life. His descriptions of dress, mannerisms, and customs add depth to an already remarkable book. Although certainly not necessary, it might be helpful to keep a good map and/or a guide to Native Americans at hand while reading this book in order to orient yourself to places and tribes as you read. A great book.

Part history and part dreamy reminiscence, this book is an account of a boy growing up in Southwest Saskatchewan in the early part of the 20th Century. The central portion of the book is pure history, and the long chapters on cowboys are particularly challenging because they require an intimate knowledge of cowboy terminology. Stegner does not mince words about the difficulties of life on the plains--extremes of heat and cold, wind, hostile topography, lack of cultural amenities--the result of which is that most who grew up there moved elsewhere. But he also shows a passionate attachment for the country of his childhood. The narrative often seems rambling because, like James Michener, the author tries to incorporate so much besides history--including the biology and geology of the nearby Cypress Hills, the biologically diverse area nearby--and even his poetic musings have elements of fact, as when he describes the wind, or the gophers, or his swimming hole, or his school, or his family's homestead, or the problems involved in the town's incorporation.

This wonderful collection of essays and fiction about the last Western frontier is both romance and anti-romance. Writing in the 1950s, Stegner captures the breath-taking beauty of the unbroken plains of southwest Saskatchewan and the excitement of its settlment at the turn of the century. Part memoir, the book recounts the years of his boyhood in a small town along the Whitemud River in 1914-1919, the summers spent on the family's homestead 50 miles away along the Canadian-U.S border. His book is also an account of the loss of that Eden and the failed promise of agricultural development in this semi-arid region with thin top soil.

Stegner is a gifted, intelligent writer, able to turn the people and events of history into compelling reading. The opening section of the book describes the experience of being on the plains and specifically in the area where Stegner was a boy. And it lays out the geography of that land -- a distant range of hills, the river, the coulees, the town -- which the book will return to again and again.

The following section evokes the period of frontier Canada's early exploration, the emergence of the metis culture, the destruction of the buffalo herds, the introduction of rangeland cattle, and then wave upon wave of settlement pushing the last of the plains Indians westward and northward. A chapter is devoted to the surveying of the boundary along the Canada-U.S. border; another chapter describes the founding of the Mounted Police and its purely Canadian style of bringing law and order to the wild west.

The middle section of the book is a novella and a short story about the winter of 1906-1907. In the longer piece, eight men rounding up cattle are caught on the open plains in an early blizzard. Stegner builds the drama and the peril of their situation artfully and convincingly. The final section of the book returns to Stegner's memories of the town and the homestead, ending with his family's departure for Montana.

Stegner lived at a time and in a place where a person born in the 20th century could still experience something of the sweep of history that transformed the American plains. I've read many books about the West, and because of his depth of thought, his gifts as a writer, and his unflinching eye, Stegner's work ranks for me among the best. I heartily recommend this book.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Wallace Stegner grew up on the prairie frontiers of North Dakota, Saskatchewan, and Montana, and in the mountains of Utah. As is indicated by the subtitle, this volume combines history, a memoir, and historical fiction. Readers who have spent significant time on the snow swept northern steppes may find a small part of themselves, and of this land, in Wolf Willow. ...
"On those miraculously beautiful and murderously cold nights glittering with the green and blue darts from a sky like polished dark metal, when the moon had gone down, leaving the hollow heavens to the stars and the overflowing cold light of the Aurora, he thought he had moments of the clearest vision ... In every direction ... the snow spread; here and there the implacable plain glinted back a spark - the beam of a cold star reflected in a crystal of ice." (The scene evokes in me a powerful memory, as I recall often standing alone on just such "murderously cold" snow blanketed prairies and gazing into those "miraculously beautiful" night skies.)