Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery—personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

""Cause for celebration . . . A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction.""
—The Atlantic Montly

""Brilliant . . . Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enchantment of life.""
—Los Angeles Times

""A fine novel, engrossing and mature . . . for when all is said individual lives are very much like bits of detritus, rolling down from the high places of stress and emotion until they reach that place where the tumbling and falling stops and they find their angle of repose. To chronicle this movement as well as this novel does is high art—and first-rate writing.""
—San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle