An American masterpiece and iconic novel of the West by National Book
Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner--a deeply moving
narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past.
Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a
wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependant on others for his
every need. Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture he retreats to his
ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of
his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who,
together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the
hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her
story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and
the America that has come of age around him.