Naturally, the subject matter and quality varies. There are 31 stories in this collection, written over a period of about 50 years. and he is left to endure the boredom of yet another day. The expectations of this poor boy are shot to. My favorite story in this collection is Goin' to Town. He and his father had a rather poor relationship and Stegner's writing about him perhaps was his effort at catharsis. It seems that Stegner was obsessed with his father, and many of his stories feature a version of him. The locales of his stories resemble those places where his gambling, drinking father took him and his family in the early 1900s. And, as you will learn by reading Jackson Benson's biography of him, Stegner had an autobiographical bent while writing his fiction. Stegner liked to write about young boys coming of age in an often thoughtless society (and family). This collection of stories, like his novels, shows the conflicts of the human soul. I think he was just getting warmed up and he certainly had decades of experience yet to share with us. It's a shame that he was killed in a car crash in the early 1990s. Of all the authors I have read, few evoke such good feelings as Wallace Stegner.
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