The daughter is a flower child from Berkeley and our old-fogey narrator spares no words in telling us what he thinks about that generation. Their family dramas provide us with at times humorous interludes to the main historical saga.
He has a local woman and her daughter help him bathe and dress, take dictation and type his story. An older divorced man confined to a wheel chair with one leg missing, Stegner interweaves his narrator’s isolation on a western ranch and his family’s efforts to get him into some kind of assisted living. Layered on the frontier story is the fictional story of the man writing it who turns these pioneers into his grandparents. It’s a great read that is largely based on the true story of a woman pioneer in the west when so many other books about this era tell the stories of men. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972, this book is considered by some to be Stegner’s masterpiece.
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