Wallace Stegner

An environmentalist, essayist and author of books, both fiction and non-fiction. Some of his works include a book of essays, One Way to Spell Man, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose; Remembering Laughter, On a Darkling Plain, Fire and Ice, The Preacher and the Slave, Big Rock Candy Mountain, and All the Little Live Things.

The vein of melancholy in the North American mind may be owing to many causes, but it is surely not weakened by the perception that the fulfillment of the American Dream means inevitably the death of the noble savagery and freedom of the wild. Wolf Willow, 1955.

Anyone who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world. Ibid.

I discovered mountain rivers late, for I was a prairie child, and knew only flatland and dryland . . . The Sound of Mountain Water, 1969.

All I knew was that it was pure delight to be where the land lifted in peaks and plunged in canyons, and to sniff air thin, spray-cooled, full of pine and spruce smells, and to be so close-seeming to the improbable indigo sky. Ibid.

I gave my heart to the mountains the minute I stood beside this river with its spray in my face and watched it thunder into foam, smooth to green glass over sunken rocks, shatter to foam again. Ibid.

By such a river it is impossible to believe that one will ever be tired or old. Every sense applauds it. Taste it, feel its chill on the teeth; it is purity absolute. Ibid.

In gaining the lovely and the usable, we have given up the incomparable. Ibid.

In that country you cannot raise your eyes&endash;unless you're in a canyon&endash;without looking a hundred miles. Ibid.

In the canyons . . . you do have the protection of cliffs, the secret places, cool water, arches and bridges and caves, and the sunken canyon stillness into which, musical as water falling into a plunge pool, the canyon wrens pour their showers of notes in the mornings. Ibid.