Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state ot state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune - in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illagal rumm-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest.

A collection of anecdotal essays makes up the memoirs of an honored writer, conservationist, and teacher as he describes the culture of the West, as well as the region's landscape, literature, and character

Marking the Sparrow's Fall is Wallace Stegner's biggest collection and the first since his death in 1993. His son, Page, has selected fifteen essays that have never before been published in any book and placed them alongside Wallace Stegner's most powerful pieces in the book's three nonfiction parts: Home Ground (memory), Testimony (defense of the earth), and Inheritance (history). The fourth section of the book is devoted to a magnificent little-known...

Seven well-known Western writers, all now in their eighties, describe their experiences growing up in the West in the early part of the twentieth century.

"John Wesley Powell's arid lands report was the first to argue that the American West could not support a conventional system of agriculture and that its lands could not sustain unlimited development. He recognized that water was a more precious resource than land, that rainfall could never support agriculture in the region, and that controlled irrigation offered the best use of its natural resources." "Years of drought have proved the value of his...

Set in 1885, The Ox-Bow Incident is a searing and realistic portrait of frontier life and mob violence in the American West. First published in 1940, it focuses on the lynching of three innocent men and the tragedy that ensues when law and order are abandoned. The result is an emotionally powerful, vivid, and unforgettable re-creation of the Western novel, which Clark transmuted into a universal story about good and evil, individual and community,...