Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier: Amazon.ca: Wallace Stegner: Books

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Review

Beautiful and moving...In many ways the best of all the good books Stegner has written. -- Walter Van Tilberg Clarck

Enchanting, heartrending, and eminently enviable. -- Vladimir Nabokov --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Book Description

Wallace Stegner weaves together fiction and nonfiction, history and impressions, childhood remembrance and adult reflections in this unusual portrait of his boyhood. Set in Cypress Hills in southern Saskatchewan, where Stegner's family homesteaded from 1914 to 1920, Wolf Willow brings to life both the pioneer community and the magnificent landscape that surrounds it. This Twentieth-Century Classics edition includes a new introductory essay by Page Stegner.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Inside This Book (Learn More)

First Sentence
An ordinary road map of the United States, one that for courtesy's sake includes the first hundred miles on the Canadian side of the Line, will show two roads, graded but not paved, reaching up into western Saskatchewan to link U.S. 2 with Canada 1, the Trans-Canada Highway. Read the first page

Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

7 Reviews

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4.9 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Vividly told account of the Canadian frontier, May 5 2003

By

Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (Paperback)

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.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars wistful retrospective, Sep 30 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (Paperback)

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.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Growing up on the northern plains., May 21 2002

By

Wesley L. Janssen (San Diego, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (Paperback)

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.)

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Most recent customer reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Stegner's Homage To The Frontier As It Was Lived
Wolf Willow is one third local history of the Cypress Hills area of Saskatchewan, One third compelling fiction and one third memior. Read more

Published on Feb 2 2000

5.0 out of 5 stars Sweet Dust and Dandelion Wine of Youth
Stegner, whose ambitious works stand as one of the finest legacies of fiction in any language, chronicles his early years in the praries of Dakotas and nearby provinces with some... Read more

Published on Dec 15 1999 by jack schaaf