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I don't know why it took me so long to get through this. I liked it...I think it was because the chapters were too long for it to be an effective bedside table book. I kept falling asleep, no fault of the book.
I chose this because I like Stegner's writing and this is kind of in the world of my studies - it's about his childhood right on the border between Saskatchewan and Montana. He writes about existing in two worlds, in a way. In the winter they lived and went to school in town, celebrated Canadian holidays, read books by British or Canadian writers, got the Canadian side of history (as regards, say, the War of 1812) and from 1914 on were at war. In the summer they farmed a parcel right on the border and were actually closer to American towns, and so they bought American goods and celebrated the 4th of July and weren't at war (until 1917).
I like the style of this book too - it starts as memoir and history, and then goes into a few chapters of fiction that deal with life in the region during the decades before the town was built and Stegner got there. Driving cattle and whatnot. Then it is back to memoir. The whole time Stegner is musing on what it means to have grown up in this place, during the last gasp of great plains homesteading. And what it means to have failed, since his family homestead never amounted to anything and eventually they left.
There is some really thoughtful stuff here. "For her sake I regretted that miserable homestead, and blamed my father for the blind and ignorant lemming-impulse that brought us to it. But on my own account I would not have missed it...How better could a boy have known loneliness, which I must think a good thing to know?...How does one know what wilderness has meant to Americans unless he has shared the guilt of wastefully and ignorantly tampering with it in the name of Progress?"