The Spectator Bird

In The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), Wallace Stegner’s thinly veiled account of his harsh upbringing, a hard-lucker named Bo Mason traverses the American West hoping to make a fortune, or at least eke a living, from one failed venture after another. His wife and children are his mostly unwilling partners throughout his long descent into poverty, violence, and despair amid parched landscapes whose once shining promise has dimmed. George Stegner, Wallace’s father and the model for this luckless character, was, if anything, even more irascible and destructive than Bo: According to Wallace, his father “in his lifetime [did] more human and environmental damage than he could have repaired in a second lifetime” (Stegner, Wallace. Qtd. in Bart Barnes, “Wallace Stegner Dies.” The Washington Post, 15 Apr. 1993). One of George Stegner’s financial schemes involved cutting down 200-year-old redwoods to sell for firewood.

Stegner described his child-self as “a little savage” who, like his father, destroyed animals and nature (Stegner, Wallace. Qtd. in Patricia Rowe Willrich, “A Perspective on Wallace Stegner.” The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1991). Stegner seemingly spent much of his adult life trying to atone for his family’s depredations.