The Big Rock Candy Mountain (Contemporary American Fiction)
Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune—in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous...
show more
Bo Mason, his wife, Elsa, and their two boys live a transient life of poverty and despair. Drifting from town to town and from state to state, the violent, ruthless Bo seeks out his fortune—in the hotel business, in new farmland, and, eventually, in illegal rum-running through the treacherous back roads of the American Northwest. Stegner portrays more than thirty years in the life of the Mason family in this masterful, harrwoing saga of people trying to survive during the lean years of the early twentieth century.
show less
Format: paperback
ISBN:
9780140139396 (0140139397)
ASIN: 0140139397
Publish date: 1991-03-01
Publisher: Penguin
Pages no: 563
Edition language: English
Category:
Classics,
Novels,
Literature,
Cultural,
Adult Fiction,
American,
Historical Fiction,
Literary Fiction,
Western,
Canada,
Fiction
Why couldn't Stegner be decent and write a book with an antagonist toward whom I could detachedly direct my righteous indignation? Instead, he wrote the Big Rock Candy Mountain with Bo, who is not one of Cormac McCarthy's depraved evil doers. Jarringly, and despite what you might believe otherwise, ...
Stegner's writing is so effortless to read that I forget I'm reading a book. Throughout the book the focus shifts from one character to another. Though we get some interior dialogue from each, we learn more about the characters from others' observations of them. Surprisingly, it makes them quite ...
Reading Wallace Stegner is like having a really great first boyfriend. He ruins you for anyone who comes later. Sometimes he's so good that you don't even want anyone after him.The Big Rock Candy Mountain is the book that should have won Stegner the Pulitzer Prize long before he wrote Angle of Repo...
This is a very hard book to read, but it is well worth it. The feelings it raises aren't pretty, although some of them are good. I think Stegner has more to say about America and says it in far more convincing and compelling style than Dos Passos. It's the kind of book that makes me want to get so...
The story of Bo Mason and Else. He is a talented dreamer with a large dose of wanderlust, who works hard at his dreams, but seems to always see them drift away. She is an escapee from an unhappy home who is smitten with Bo as an 18-year-old. Marriage ensues, children, and hardship. This is a great A...
Log in with Facebook 
 by Wallace Stegner, now listed on BookLikes)