The Big Rock Candy Mountain [Paperback]

Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifing from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks outhis fortune--in the hotel business, on new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the threacherous back roads of the American Northwest. Bo chases after the promise of teh American dream through Minnesota, the Dakotas, Saskatchewan, Montana, Utah and Nevada, but ultimately there is no escaping the devastating reach of the Depression and his own ruinous fate.

In this affecting narrative, a defining masterpiece by the dean of Western writers (The New York Times), Wallace Stegner portrays more than three decades in the life of the Mason family as they struggle to survivle during the lean years of the early twentieth century.

With an introduction by Robert Stone. Stegner has felt the spell of mountain and prairie, of drought, flood, and blizzard.... A harrowing saga. --The New York Times

Stands out beautifully and unforgettably. --The New Yorker

The most important book Wallace Stegner has done. --Kirkus ReviewsWallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bl³.