"All my life I have been going away east and coming home west", writes Wallace Stegner in this collection of his writings, which has been selected and annotated by his son, Page Stegner.These are Wallace Stegner's major writings about the American West, a collection of essays and a little-known novella, "Genesis". They are as relevant today as the day they were written; each reveals the stylistic grace and intellectual rigor that earned Stegner his enormous readership and fame.Before Marking the Sparrow's Fall, 15 of these essays have only appeared in magazines and newspapers: "I Sing of America", "That Great Falls Year", "Xanadu by the Salt Flats", "The World's Strangest Sea", "Lake Powell", "Back Roads River", "Backroads of the American West", "Why I like the West", "The Best Idea We Ever Had", "Living On Our Principal", "Bernardo DeVoto", "Conservation Equals Survival", "Now If I Ruled the World", "The Function of' Aridity", and "Land: America's History Teacher". Three essays have only appeared in anthologies (and are therefore not available in books authored by Stegner alone): "Qualified Homage o Thoreau", "The Twilight of Self Reliance", and "The Rocky Mountain West".