"Collected Stories is a collection of some of the best virtues and values to be found in contemporary fiction. Direct and honest, these short works stay in the mind both for their wisdom and for the evocative flexibility of their prose.

Here are tales of young love and older wisdom; of the order and consistency of the natural world and the chaos, contradictions, and yet continuities of the human being. There is sweet love in a berry patch; there are bittersweet reunions, trials and test, of manhood and friendship and the sometimes foolish and impractical yet noble dreams of man.

Stegner is one of our keenest observers as well as a deeply passionate activist-- on behalf not of ephemera but of the eternal: countryside and sky, loyalties and freedoms.