Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (Penguin Classics)

One of my favorite Stegner books. The map at the beginning of the book is invaluable and Stegner's research is impressive. He captures the time & place with skill and expertise. Interesting to note that he & Ivan Doig are young boys in the same general area of Montana and the Canadian border. I was able to locate places on Stegner's map that showed up in Nocturnal Prairie by Doig. Both of these authors have a clarity in their writing syle that is mesmorizing and refreshing to me.

Wallace Stegner, the inveterate fiction/non-fiction writer of western America, is at his best with this autobiographical account of his six years (aged 10 to 16)living with his family in south-central Saskatchewan, Canada with frequent visits to north-central Montana in the period of the "closing of the Canadian Frontier" with thrashing machines replacing short-horn/long-horn cattle drives from Canada to the US and vice-versa. Stegner's eye for details and the nuances of life on the Canadian/American praries is never failing in capturing both the people and the times (1910-16)particularly his novella half way through his autobiographical memories of the great blizzard of 1907 and the last cattle drive from French River to Montana through the eyes of a benighted English gentlemen hellbent on learning about cowboy life first hand. The book, named for a yellow bush found along river banks in Canada and Montana, and known for its distinctive pleasing fragrance, is a tour de force of the continental Great Plains and life on the turn of the century prairie Canada. An excellent companion to Willa Cather's quasi-biographical O, Pioneers!

Wolf Willow is Wallace Stegner's "memoir" of his youth in Saskatchewan nearly a century ago, a narrative augmented by his gripping reconstruction of the vicissitudes of a landscape hard and hostile towards those who sought to subdue and settle it. You'll find the heart of his account in the back-to-back chapters entitled "Genesis" and "Carrion Spring," which stand as irrefutable witness to the lucid style which won Stegner his Pulitzer.My recommendation: if parts of this tale seem, on occasion, thick and ploddy, isolate those two chapters and have a rigorous go at their 100 pages. Here you'll discover the rhythms of Stegner's poetic prose as you meet trapper Schultz (with"his passionate taciturnity" behind eyes "gray as agates"), along with his Russian wolfhounds (his alter egos), along with his pimply-faced kid, as feral and menacing as the old man. Here you'll encounter Rusty and Ray and their cohorts in a winter "wilderness [that] howled in all its voices," listen to "the faint dark monotone of wolves," and glimpse "a horn of moon declining toward the western horizon," above men trapped in harshest circumstance, "welded and riveted into a society of friends and brothers."In the end, Wolf Willow will expose you to a time and trek of epic desolation and perdurable haunting, under the guidance of a writer so mesmerizing and compelling that long after you've put down his book you'll find yourself unable to put down his story.J. Michael [email protected]. 30, 2013

Over the past couple of months, I have brought up "Wolf Willow" to a couple of friends who are readers. It's a difficult book to sell to friends, though. Ones says, "Well, it's part history, partessay, part memoir, and their eyes glaze over." Today I took the bull by the horns and bought a copy and had it sent to the second friend. Then I realized that I hadn't bothered to leave areview on amazon.com, and so here I am, like the Ancient Mariner, to tug at people's sleeves, hoping that anyone who happens by this site might read my words and be tilted toward buyingthis book. It is wonderful. You don't need to take my advice: look at the reviews by famous people, and see that V. Nabokov found it "enthralling, captivating, and infinitely ...." oh, I can'tremember the exact words, buy Nabokov's point was that he envied Stegner's work in this book. (For Nabokov, that's high praise).And that's it. If you reading these words, you're half-way home, half-way to deciding to read this book. I hope these words are the finger on the scale that makes you purchase "Wolf Willow."If you do, you'll remember this review, I'll bet.

His writing is beautiful, but I struggled with all of the information and detail in the beginning. Once it hit the fiction part of the book it definitely got me intrigued and the remainder of the book was so descriptive of the frontier life.

If you are a fan of Stegner, you will probably like this book. It did take me a little bit to get into it, as the first chapters read more like a history book than an actual tale. Once I was hooked though I couldn't put it down. The tale of the storm/cattle drive of 1906 is worth the price of admission! I was actually very cold reading this part. The slow amble, the characters and story line are indeed a pleasant reminder of how hard these first pioneers really had to work, just to survive. Stegner really makes you feel like you are part of the history. If the history books in my formative school years had been half this interesting, I could've been a real scholar. Definite winner.

Like many other reviewers of Wolf Willow, I am amazed by how this book speaks to me. Probably my deep enjoyment arises from reminiscing about my own childhood.... an experience of a much simpler life and time. A time of creeks and turtles, hundreds of hummingbirds massed on a giant azalea patch falling over the creek, playing with the children of sharecroppers, etc. Wolf Willow brought me back to that stunning time of my own childhood and amazement that Mr. Stegner was able to raise a simple life to such lively interest.