The Big Rock Candy Mountain

By Wallace Stegner

Stegner’s prose are beautiful. He paints word pictures that are so vivid they make you feel like you are living in the time and place he describes. This book takes place on the frontier from the late 19th through the early 20th century and I learned a lot.  But this is not a story that I wanted to know. There are good people trapped with bad people in a cycle of destructive behavior. And it finally end badly. I listened to it as an audio book and i was compelled by the writing and repelled by the story. It gets a five from me on my arbitrary 1 to 10 scale.

I read this book because in First, Evan Thomas mentions that O’Connor had Stegner for an English class at Stanford. Which prompted me to read Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. which I loved. And then I found a paperback edition of The Big Rock Candy Mountain on my to be read shelf so I read it also.