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The Big Rock Candy Mountain

4.04 of 5 stars 4.04 · rating details · 2,637 ratings · 345 reviews

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...more

Paperback, Contemporary American Fiction, 576 pages

Published March 1st 1991 by Penguin (first published 1943)

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Sep 25, 2012 Sue rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: literary-fiction, u-s, canada, classics, read-in-2012, westerns

My first Wallace Stegner novel! I am very pleased to have that bridge crossed (all puns intended). It's a story of family,searching for home, escape and return, survival against adversity, the American dream gone wrong, and ultimately, forgiveness.

Told by multiple narrators, the four members of the Mason family, the story covers some thirty plus years in the life of Elsa, the man she comes to love and marry, Bo, and their two sons, Chet and Bruce. During those years, there is love, humor, anguis...more

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Jul 23, 2007 Andrew rated it 5 of 5 stars

What Stegner might call a big three-master, this family saga quasi-autobiographically traces the Mason family from their ignominious Midwestern roots through a series of get-rich-quick blunders that takes them from Oregon to Saskatchewan to Montana to Salt Lake to Reno.

Narrated objectively, the book's emotional compass is the family's youngest son, Stegner's version of himself, and the catharsis of this book is what makes its best moments remarkably fine and what overloads the circuitry in the...more What Stegner might call a big three-master, this family saga quasi-autobiographically traces the Mason family from their ignominious Midwestern roots through a series of get-rich-quick blunders that takes them from Oregon to Saskatchewan to Montana to Salt Lake to Reno.

Narrated objectively, the book's emotional compass is the family's youngest son, Stegner's version of himself, and the catharsis of this book is what makes its best moments remarkably fine and what overloads the circuitry in the later passages, marring what is otherwise a masterpiece.

One of Joyce's architectural strokes of genius was to displace the emotional core of Ulysses away from Stephen, and hence, himself, onto Bloom. Stegner takes an opposite path and grinds the heart of his fictive stand-in until the prose begins to come undone, much as An Incredible Work of Staggering Genius is at its best when emotion is channeled through cleverness.

Still, Stegner is one of very few Western writers who had both the luck to witness the transformation of an agrarian frontier society into the modern mess of vacuous dead spaces and exploited wilderness that it now is, and the capacities to write about it in an enduring way. Stegner's work does not sag into a diminutive genre the way most Western writing does. Like Steinbeck's California, or Joyce's Ireland, the West in Stegner functions as a foil for the Universal, not as the object of a sentimental and defective paean.

As he explains in more detail in his non-fiction work, Stegner's childhood experience of extreme poverty in the go-for-broke villages, derelict hotels, isolated farms and logging camps of pre-New Deal America taught him that the Individual, that Goliath of Right Coast American Mythology, cannot survive the brutality of the Western landscape. The plot of Stegner's book, and in many ways the core of his thinking, is that rather than a society of neatly spaced Individuals striving towards transcendence, the unforgiving actuality of the West (its poverty, its harsh weather, and most of all, its aridity) forces people to cling to one another in order to survive, in a delicate balance between dependence and destruction.

As he explains in his essays on the West, it is the West's aridity (which in Stegner's thinking is, as is geology, a metaphor of vast proportions that inevitably is a metaphor for itself) that causes one of the West's most visible features: bunch grass, the clumps of meager, yellow grass that dot the desolate range. In the West even the grass has to huddle together to survive.(less)

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Jan 04, 2011 Jeanette rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Jeanette by: Julie

Shelves: all-fiction, america, canada, extraordinary-prose, five-star-fiction, domestic-and-relationship-fiction, to-be-read-again, wally-the-wonderful

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 Repose. I've read commentary indicating that Big Rock Candy Mountain is largely autobiographical. If that is true, my heart aches for the little boy that was Wallace Stegner. Perhaps those early painful ex...more

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Aug 05, 2008 Scott rated it 4 of 5 stars

This is Stegner's attempt to understand his parents and their making of his identity. He beautifully conceals who the real hero of the tale is until the last pages: the somewhat effeminate, philosophical son, who sees both his mother and his father for what they were, but doesn't ultimately begrudge them their sins. After all, they live on in his own history. He could only condemn them as much as he could condemn himself.

The brilliant and intimate storytelling of Stegner's later novels (the not...more

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Oct 10, 2007 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Stegner lovers, westerners, adventurers

Shelves: fiction

I'm on a Stegner kick. The Big Rock Candy Mountain drags your heart along for the ride as you read about two generations of the Mason family and their (mis)adventures scratching out a life in succeeding versions of America's western frontier. The patriarch Bo Mason berates his wife Elsa and frightens his sons Chet and Bruce across more states than you can count. But even in the end, his insatiable taste for booms and busts remains endearing, or at least somehow forgivable.

A little long towards...more

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Sep 12, 2009 Corinne rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: the-nook-book-club

I feel spent, having finished this book. I took more time reading it than any book in recent memory - and it wasn't only its 563 pages that made it a long read. I had to read with a pen at the ready, so many ideas and images and thoughts I wanted to highlight.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a western book. A character study. A journey. But not a there-and-back-again book like Bilbo Baggins wrote. It's a go and go again kind of journey, searching ever further afield for that one thing that will ma...more I feel spent, having finished this book. I took more time reading it than any book in recent memory - and it wasn't only its 563 pages that made it a long read. I had to read with a pen at the ready, so many ideas and images and thoughts I wanted to highlight.

The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a western book. A character study. A journey. But not a there-and-back-again book like Bilbo Baggins wrote. It's a go and go again kind of journey, searching ever further afield for that one thing that will make you happy, always finding that it just slipped out of your fingers.

Bo Mason is that dreamer - a schemer who will gamble on a sure thing, following whatever lead will drop him on top of that Big Rock Candy Mountain the soonest. He'll farm, work the railroad, bootleg or run a "blind pig" - whatever it takes to get money in his pocket the fastest. And to Elsa, the daughter of Norwegian immigrants, Bo's zest for life and skills with a shotgun lure her into a love that will test all the strength she's got as they live their lives during the hard years of the early 20th century.

The road their life takes, the unbelievable anguish and sacrifice, the horrible choices and bum deals and the eking out of an existence, the packing up and starting over - you would think that it would be so depressing that you'd want to just chuck the book out the window. But Wallace Stegner is a literary genius because he ties up this cheerless and heartbreaking story with a writing style and way with words that is so amazing you can't help but be floored by the beauty of it. How is that possible? The turn of phrase and poignantly expressed truths stopped me time and again. And as we read the story from different points of view, we see the strengths in the characters, usually deeply hidden under their glaring weaknesses. All except Elsa, whose strengths and weaknesses are both transparent - she is one of the most intriguing and sympathetic characters I've read.

I also loved that this book took me to the Utah of long ago, an emerging place, a western wasteland of outcasts and misfits that was slowly turning into something grand and worthwhile - the side of Utah that the Mormons of my ancestry probably wished didn't exist and certainly wouldn't have appreciated. The language of some characters was really rough and there were scenes of serious ugliness. But this book made a time and place and cross-section of people so real to me. I can't even use the words "grand" or "epic" or "sweeping" because it felt too intimate for those adjectives, too painful - like reading someone's diary and finally understanding how hard their life had been. And despite the language, despite the ugliness, the scope of this book and the way it made me feel and the sense it gave me of a time now forgotten - a time when the great wandering of early Americans was coming to a close - those things make me want to give Big Rock Candy Mountain an award.(less)

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Mar 19, 2009 Ellie rated it 5 of 5 stars

Wow....what can I say that can do justice to this book? It's quite a journey with Stegner's family, from before he was born until early adulthood. His father has grandiose ideas and a restless spirit and drags the family all over several states as well as Saskatchewan, Canada looking for the next "get rich quick" scheme. Although the book jacket synopsis calls Bo Mason (the character name for Stegner's dad) "ruthless and violent" he is more than that, a multi-layered character. It's fascinating...more

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Dec 22, 2009 Jen rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: epics

This is a difficult book to review because it is the full saga of a man and his wife and then their children. It starts out like a cute Western or a Bonanza episode, and then it switches pretty quickly to a classic Stegner study of relationships: love, loyalty, jealousy, despair, heartache.

The protagonist is a man born after his time, a pioneer and explorer born after the taming of the West, who restlessly searches for the easy life on "the big rock candy mountain" that he's sure is out there s...more

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Oct 26, 2008 Will Byrnes rated it 5 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. 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 American saga, covering the main characters from adolescence to old age. It gives us a look at western North America (US and Canada) at the end of the 19th century into the mid 20th. There are times wh...more

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Apr 28, 2013 Paul Lima rated it 4 of 5 stars

Epic in nature, yet about small lives. Brilliantly written. Lags in places for me (a bit less is more). But the characters are real. And the times (from mid-1800's to the depression) are fascinating. Feel I learned a lot about the evolution of America, from horse and buggy to cars and roads. A long leisurely read. It's not Crossing to Safety, Stegner's brilliant final novel, but there are similarities. Well worth the read.

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Feb 05, 2011 Steven rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: classics

It certainly wasn't what I expected. There were very nice moments, but overall it was just ... lacking. It got worse in the last third where Bruce becomes the focal point and rambles on and on about little things. I was hoping for a book similar in scope to John Steinbeck's East of Eden. At times this one came close, but the canonization of the enduring wife/mother vs. the neglect or brutality of the husband/father wore pretty thin. It's not a horrible story, but I don't see myself ever picking...more

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Oct 07, 2012 Greer rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-books

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. This sprawling, semi-autobiographical novel tells the saga of the ill-fated Mason family during the early 20th century. Father Bo Mason dominates the family, subjecting them to his volatile moods and sometimes violent outbursts, and dragging them from one location to another in the Western US and Canada while pursuing various "get rich quick" schemes. His wife Elsa is dignified, kind, and intelligent, but her loyalty to Bo deprives her of having the settled life she longs for. Their sons Chet an...more

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Aug 26, 2012 Robert rated it 5 of 5 stars

I don't know why it has taken me so long to read my way through Wallace Stegner's fiction, and it feels odd to be giving a novel published in 1943 such high marks as a compelling narrative that captures some of the rougher times in American history so powerfully.

I'm sure all my praise for The Big Rock Candy Mountain has been offered before, but I'll offer it again. While the book starts slowly--Part I is the weakest part--it gathers strength as it unfurls the struggles of Harry "Bo" Mason, Elsa...more I don't know why it has taken me so long to read my way through Wallace Stegner's fiction, and it feels odd to be giving a novel published in 1943 such high marks as a compelling narrative that captures some of the rougher times in American history so powerfully.

I'm sure all my praise for The Big Rock Candy Mountain has been offered before, but I'll offer it again. While the book starts slowly--Part I is the weakest part--it gathers strength as it unfurls the struggles of Harry "Bo" Mason, Elsa Mason, and their boys, Chet and Bruce. They are a family that lived, fictionally at least, from the early 1900s through the Depression and Prohibition in the upper midwest, the far west, and parts of Canada. There was no safety net for them as they farmed until they gave up farming for Bo's bootlegging, and there was no general consciousness or legal protection available to keep a woman and her children safe from the abuses of their husband and father. Some of these abuses were simply the dark sides of of Bo's emotional make-up. The force that gave him great energy was emotionally destructive as well as a source of resilience. But that combination was hard on Elsa, more or less deadly for Chet, and damaging for Bruce, who surprisingly manages to survive as the brightest and most determined of the story's main characters.

Elsa's stoicism and her romantic decision to stick with Bo when she knew she shouldn't gives the book a kind of moral north star. If you want to know what's right in life, look to her. If you want to know what's probably wrong, look to Bo, and to a lesser extent to the abused and defensive boys.

As a writer, Stegner is ambitious and dextrous. There are passages in this book that rival Willa Cather's beautiful accounts of the midwest. There are passages with the drive of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men. And there are passages that presage William Kennedy's marvelous Albany tales of small-time hoodlums walking the plank between a bottle of whiskey and a bag full of cash.

This is a sad book. As many times as Bo gets knocked down, taking the family with him, he's certain to get back up...only to be knocked down again. The America of that period was rough on unschooled working men and women, farmers, common laborers, dreamers, and people who could not depend on, or get along with, their families.

Of course, it's still rough for many in this country, but not as rough as then, and yet paradoxically perhaps also not as exciting, physical, even sensual. There's essentially no God in Stegner's fictional world, but there are two factors that he handles and relies upon with true mastery. The first is the beauty of the natural world, the world of mountains, of hunting, of sun, wind, snow, hard rocks and sweet-smelling pines. The second is memory and memory's ability to provide some little incentive to keep on going, some fine moment that fills the worst moments with hope. These two elements move the Masons forward and sustain Bruce, transforming him from a fairly desperate, frightened little boy into a wary but self-reliant man. The rest don't make it; simple as that: they just don't make it. And that's why The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a sad book but a worthy book, unbelievably packed with the drama of the mundane on the edge of constant disaster.(less)

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Jun 18, 2012 JoAnna rated it 4 of 5 stars

I have a love/hate relationship with Wallace Stegner. I really like his writing style and the emotion that it carries, but sometimes he makes me feel uncomfortable. Perhaps that is what he is trying to achieve. In The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Bo and Elsa Mason and their two sons live a very unconventional life. Bo is a dreamer and doesn't want their family to just be comfortable; he wants wealth and prestige. Bo's pursuit of the easy way to fame and fortune takes the family all over - from the M...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Christy rated it 5 of 5 stars

Wallace Stegner did it again. I have loved all of his books, especially Angle of Repose. Although I didn't like this one as much, it was still an amazing book. His descriptions of the American west were really well done, and I loved it especially since I have lived in, visited, and loved these places throughout my life. Although the story is depressing, it is so real and vivid that I enjoyed it quite a bit. It did drag a little bit in the middle, but I am so glad that I kept reading because of t...more

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Apr 23, 2012 Saskia Marijke Niehorster-Cook rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: autobiography

What is is about the books from Wallace Stegner that make me feel as if he is describing and telling part of my family story? It is always so intriguing to me. His writing is so complete, it has lots of scenic detail description, psychological insight, emotionally saturated characters, and chuckful adventures that keep on going. I am also suspecting that they carry large parts of himself and that each one is also a different version from something in his life, and I believe this is so because th...more What is is about the books from Wallace Stegner that make me feel as if he is describing and telling part of my family story? It is always so intriguing to me. His writing is so complete, it has lots of scenic detail description, psychological insight, emotionally saturated characters, and chuckful adventures that keep on going. I am also suspecting that they carry large parts of himself and that each one is also a different version from something in his life, and I believe this is so because the stories carry a lot of personal thought and care, almost a little confession as to what made the character into what he/she is.

Though I absolutely love Angle of Repose, I believe this book is more fluent in reading, it has less of a "retardant", less heavy plodding along, almost as if one goes down through the river of life witnessing the events of this family. The story is about a beautiful Norske Girl with flaming red hair that escapes her home because her father marries her best friend. She moves in with her uncle, only to meet the "boy" next door, a dark skinned and statuesque physique of a man named "Bo". I always believe that names carry importance and here Bo is the American sound for "Beau" meaning good looking and paramour of "Else".

Theirs is the story of a different kind of love, both holding on for dear life to each other though their dreams are the exact opposite from the other and thus as one find their dream come true, the other chafes under it. It is the story of how the form a family and how they manage it and care for it, and how it sets them adrift geographically and socially from their world to roam and make home after home in a land that promises a lot to adventurers and money while the harsh reality is that it is no longer there. It is a thing of dreams past, though Bo just quite does not want to believe it and keeps chasing quick rich schemes that eventually bring the family to its demise.

It is the story of a willful couple that works hard to get what they dream of, and of their children and how they are shaped by their parents, and how they make history together and carry the family history till it shapes them into what they too become.

I really recommend this book. It is full of all things good and it is set in a period of time in the American history that teaches us a lot of lessons.

My Favorite quotes:

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines.There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line of a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was, he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.(Pg. 432)

"I suppose" he wrote, "that the understanding of any person is an exercise in genealogy. A man is not a static organism to be taken apart and analyzed and classified. A man is movement, motion, a continuum. There is no beginning to him. e runs through his ancestors, and the only beginning is the primal beginning of the single cell in the slime. The proper study of mankind is man, but man is an endless curve on the eternal curve on the eternal graph paper, and who can see the whole curve?(pg. 236)

He was a Westerner, whatever that was. The moment he crossed the Big Sioux and got into the brown country where the raw earth showed, the minute grass got sparser and the air dryer and the service gas station less grandiose and the towns rattier, the moment he saw his first lonesome shack on the baking flats with a tipsy windmill creaking away and the reluctant underground water, he knew approximately where he belonged. He belonged where the overalls saw the washtub less often. where the corduroy bagged more sloppily at the knees, where the ground was bare and sometimes raw and the sand-devils whirled across the landscape and the barns were innocent of any paint except advertising Dr. Pierce's Golden Medical Discovery. The feeling came on him like sun after an overcast day, and in pure contentment he limbered his knees and slouched deeper against the Ford's left hand door....As long as the road ran west he didn't want to stop, because that was where he was going, west beyond the Dakotas, toward home. (Pg. 464) This is exactly how I feel when I drove to California ever Summer before Irene and Lee moved here. I still feel home is there...

Her hair had been dried and re-braided, and her face was wiped clean of any expression, even the lines rubbed away as an artist might erase lines from a sketch. It was a younger face that lay there, a face completely calm, a prettier face actually than he had known. But it was not his mother. His mother had been wiped away with the lines that living had left on her.She was the shading, not the face itself. In this wax image there was none of her kindness, none of her dignity. This corpse was a thing you could bury without regret, put into the ground beside your brother's body; and the other things, the qualities that had been mystically your mother, you buried within yourself, you became a grave for her as you were a grave for Chet, and you carried your dead unquietly within you. (Pg. 515)(less)

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Mar 07, 2012 Harold Titus rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book moved me to tears. Perhaps that is because I am in my seventies and have lived and witnessed much of what Wallace Stegner writes about. Perhaps it is because I have come to understand how complex human beings are and how easily they can bring injury and hardship upon the people they love.

The novel begins in the year 1905 in Minnesota and ends in Utah in the 1930s. Its central character is Harry “Bo” Mason, a physically powerful, aggressive person who left his parents’ home at the age o...more This book moved me to tears. Perhaps that is because I am in my seventies and have lived and witnessed much of what Wallace Stegner writes about. Perhaps it is because I have come to understand how complex human beings are and how easily they can bring injury and hardship upon the people they love.

The novel begins in the year 1905 in Minnesota and ends in Utah in the 1930s. Its central character is Harry “Bo” Mason, a physically powerful, aggressive person who left his parents’ home at the age of fourteen, survived working hard-labor odd jobs, is self-reliant, fiercely stubborn, and, given to “chasing dreams of acquiring quick wealth,” unrealistically ambitious. According to his son Bruce he is “a self-centered and dominating egotist who insists on submission from his family and yet at the same time is completely dependent on his wife.” He is conscious of the great injury he inflicts on his family and suffers much remorse, but he does not change.

Early in the story Bo’s decision to become a bootlegger is challenged by his wife Elsa. “For a moment he stood, almost hating her, hating the way she and the kids hung on him and held him back, loaded him with responsibilities and then hamstrung him when he tried to do anything.”

“I made up my mind that I was your wife and I’d stay your wife, no matter what,” Elsa responds. “I never asked for more than we had. I’d have been satisfied with just a bare living, if we could only keep what we’ve had up here. So don’t ever say you did this for me or them.”

Not weak, Elsa is soft in that she is unselfish, accepting, loving. Late in the novel she counsels Bruce. “Some day you’ll learn that you can’t have people exactly the way you want them and that a little understanding is all you need to make most people seem halfway decent.” In many ways Bo is a sympathetic character. I wanted him to succeed in each of his risky endeavors. Nevertheless, Elsa is whom I cherished and respected.

Essential to the story is how Chet and Bruce, the two sons, affected by the characteristics and actions of their parents, develop.

I was fascinated with what Stegner does with the theme of risk-taking and reward, an issue every person is confronted with as an adult. How much is a person willing to risk to achieve an ambitious goal? How much less is that person willing to accept? What makes a person happy? Stegner explores as well the importance of heredity: how much a person is shaped by past generations. Reflecting upon his parents and then himself, Bruce decides: “Perhaps it took several generations to make a man, … several combinations and re-creations of his mother’s gentleness and resilience, his father’s enormous energy and appetite for the new, a subtle blending of masculine and feminine, selfish and selfless, stubborn and yielding, before a proper man could be fashioned.”

“The Big Rock Candy Mountain” is a remarkable book.
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Dec 09, 2011 Ensiform rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction

The only word for this 560-page slice of Americana is "saga." It's a rich, detailed, loving and amazingly authentic portrayal of an American family, the Masons, from the turn of the century to the '30s. In telling the story of this never satisfied, ever-scheming, gambling liquor-runner and his wife and two boys, Stegner recreates vividly and successfully everything that touches them. He describes with care and apparent ease the thrill and trouble of working the first cars with cranks; the vast p...more

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Aug 02, 2011 Seth rated it 5 of 5 stars

I am announcing my new favorite novel. Stegner's critique of the Western US is tremendously insightful. I enjoyed the story because the characters are written with profound compassion and understanding. Its the kind of compassion a son feels towards his flawed parents after years of reconciling their sins with their good intentions. Essentially, Stegner's compassion is synthesized by the theme that we are all products of our environments and cannot describe ourselves merely by the cumulative exp...more I am announcing my new favorite novel. Stegner's critique of the Western US is tremendously insightful. I enjoyed the story because the characters are written with profound compassion and understanding. Its the kind of compassion a son feels towards his flawed parents after years of reconciling their sins with their good intentions. Essentially, Stegner's compassion is synthesized by the theme that we are all products of our environments and cannot describe ourselves merely by the cumulative experiences from birth to present. Rather, we understand a person only after knowing the circumstances of their upbringing, the upbringing of their parents, grandparents and so on. Thus, the perpetual vices and strengths of our parents and great great grandparents all contribute to our strengths and weaknesses.

Bo Mason, (one of the more charismatic characters in my readings) can only be so much as a man. His inability to control his temper, his tacky interests, and his egoism cause cruel outcomes for his wife and sons. Yet, Bo had done as much as he could because the abuse and ignorance of his childhood limited his potential. Were he able to cultivate an education he may have been exposed to a more rewarding personal ethic and taken more responsibility for the suffering his shortcomings caused. His limitations could have been overcome only if his circumstances were different. Stegner's story telling aggressively thrills us with suspenseful plot, inspiring morality, and sobering tragedy.

Big Rock is a gritty and hard hitting indictment of a man's bad temper. I have never felt so ashamed of my shortcomings as a father and a husband. While I am no Bo, his tendencies are only an exaggerated version of me and every other father I know. Stegner's compassion and insight call me to repentance more effectively and persuasively than scripture. Big rock stirred my conscience to change my parenting approach and now I find myself severely reprimanded as a father anytime my conduct hints of Bo Mason. In that way Stegner proves especially correct about behavior and the human condition. It is difficult to change a man who is a product of his circumstances. However, a man's experiences are greatly expanded when he engages in a more contemplative and cultivated lifestyle. In many ways, Bo Mason was an animal and not a civilized man because civility requires the cultivation of reading and society. He did not belong to a community to cultivate this civility and it is this civility which would have informed him of his tragic flaws.

Big Rock may not be for everyone. I recommend to fans of masculine literature, fathers, and those interested in frontier lit.(less)

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Nov 04, 2009 May-Ling rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

you can sum up this book with one word...struggle.

in a grapes of wrath kind of way, this book is all about making it, and after being introduced to bo and his radiant energy and ambition, it feels promising. about fifty pages in, you realize that the book is only about struggle and that bo is truly searching for the big rock candy mountain, which always lies beyond the family's fingertips.

although the novel is framed back in the day, it's a telltale story of keeping up with the joneses in the s...more

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Jan 21, 2013 Ross rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a pretty depressing story, but it is nevertheless a great, if long, read because Wallace Stegner does such a masterful job of portraying the characters and the landscape. At one level, the novel is about a family that is dominated by a man who is a hopeless get-rich-quick dreamer (hence the title) with a violent temper. They move from North Dakota to Canada to Montana, Utah and California, living the life that comes with the hardship and being part of the criminal underworld. Stegner pai...more

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Sep 13, 2012 Glee rated it 5 of 5 stars

A stunning book. I finally understand the phrase "deathless prose". I remained glued to this book/(audiobook) even though the story was painful. The events in this book closely parallel Stegner's own life, and a tough one it was (or at least the first 30 or so years of it covered here). Born to two remarkable, if deeply flawed parents, this story follows a younger son in a family that survives, but does not triumph in the early 20th century. Some of this was due to the economic situations of the...more

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Jan 30, 2011 Kate rated it 5 of 5 stars

I am embarrassed to say I had not heard of Wallace Stegner before listening to a program about him on NPR a while back. I arbitrarily chose "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" as my introduction to his writing. Having just finished it this morning, I have to say I believe it deserves a place on the shelves of famous American classics, next to Steinbeck, Hemingway and our other most beloved American authors. In this book, the trials of the Mason family in the early 20th century American West reminds me...more

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Sep 24, 2011 Sonia rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: everyone

Recommended to Sonia by: self-recommended

Big Rock Candy Mountain is my 2011 must-read recommendation. And we still have months to go before the end the year, and many books to read! But I just know that I will not read another book that is as big and real as BRCM for some time to come. Written in 1935 by one of our foremost American authors, this book has plenty of characters struggling with self-esteem, childhood demons and marital woes against a historical and political backdrop of The Depression, Prohibition and development in the n...more

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Mar 21, 2011 Petrea rated it 4 of 5 stars

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I'm glad I finally got around to reading this book. Other people around me disliked it because of the abusive father and sadness, but I loved the lyrical way Stegner writes about the Canadian wilderness, and even Utah. His people are pretty intense--as they are in all his books. While his was far from an ordinary family he struggled with the same things that we all do as we examine our parents, and grandparents, siblings, environment and try to sort it all out and find ourselves in the mix---and...more

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Jun 21, 2012 Regan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose is absolutely one of my favorite books. The beauty of Stegner’s prose combined with a plot that follows the challenges of settling in the West that my own ancestors faced makes it resonate with me deeply: From wishful goldmines in Nevada to bootlegging and moving and moving and moving and switching jobs over and over.

I hoped I’d have the same reaction to The Big Rock Candy Mountain. It’s got much of the same beautiful prose and understanding of living in and mak...more

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Apr 29, 2011 Debbie Barney rated it 4 of 5 stars

As the stars above indicate, I "really liked it"! There really were some "amazing" bits (5 stars, even!) -- including the late-discovered fact that this book has an initial copyright of 1947! [N.B. I'm an avid audio-book listener, and as such, do not always have a copyright page readily at hand!] This I found to be an amazing fact because Stegner did such a masterful job of creating thoroughly real and (to this day), pertinent and quintessentially American characters. Stegner has a firm grasp on...more As the stars above indicate, I "really liked it"! There really were some "amazing" bits (5 stars, even!) -- including the late-discovered fact that this book has an initial copyright of 1947! [N.B. I'm an avid audio-book listener, and as such, do not always have a copyright page readily at hand!] This I found to be an amazing fact because Stegner did such a masterful job of creating thoroughly real and (to this day), pertinent and quintessentially American characters. Stegner has a firm grasp on the American slow-motion, multi-generational transition from less educated, hard-raised and harder-living, westward-/fortune-bound pioneers to more self-aware, highly-educated, (and in at least some cases) less direction-/fortune-focused individuals who revel in simple, sensual beauties of the continent and the bitter-sweet ironies associated with its settling and growth.

Where the Harry McClintock song lyric, "In the Big Rock Candy Mountains" describes the glorious fantasies of the good life to be had "in" the big rock candy mountains, Stegner's novel describes the still-present longing for that "Big Rock Candy Mountain" itself: the American Dream of making it "big" by getting in "on the bottom floor" (whether that be by staking -- and holding -- your claim to the best of the territory before developers move in and you reap financial rewards that keep you from ever working another day in your life, or whether that be by starting the businesses that boom and provide returns beyond your wildest dreams). The "mountain" is that ever-present "dream" in the American psyche, and perhaps, in all the world around, for that "Slum Dog Millionaire," game-winning, pot-taking, luck-of-the-draw: it never fades but shape-shifts and beckons the weary from the curve of the horizon, that miraculous mirage that perennially promises makeovers to and/or manifestations of the rosiest outcomes we can imagine.

At least until we come to realize that the Dream and the Mountain are just that: we will encounter many dreams and mountains, we will move beyond each in succession (if we are diligent), in our lives. Hope springs eternal! Enjoying our lives as they already are and increasing the well being and happiness of our planet companions from day to day is often more difficult and painful, but ever so much more important and rewarding. But how to learn that, and how best to teach it? Stegner's past has shown me how hard it is to realize that here in 2011 we still very much have the "look and feel" of the American country in (and before) 1947. We've not come so very far from the childhood (adulthood?) dreams of candy mountains (filled with whiskey lakes and cigarette trees). http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/obroth...(less)

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Jan 24, 2009 Julie rated it 4 of 5 stars

I love Wallace Stegner but this isn’t quite as brilliant as Angle of Repose. It was a great book but also very long and pretty dense. It is long and takes a while to get through. It is the story of a family trying to make it in the West. The father is kind of a loser and struggles to make a real home for his family. His wife’s whole life is spent wishing for something she never has… a real home. He becomes a bootlegger and shames his family. In the end, he dies alone and one son is left to try a...more

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Oct 16, 2011 Mary Etta rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I always wonder what the difference might be in a book in print vs. an audio book. In any case I always like a Stegner book. He writes so much better than many others I currently read.

I happen to be also reading in print "Look Homeward Angel", Thomas Wolfe. Apparently, both writing biographically. Both had abusive childhoods. Wolfe takes a very long time to tell his story, much description and detail. Both great writers. I prefer Stegner's telling though both are hard to read in the hurt that i...more

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Mar 22, 2011 Benedict rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is a superbly written, powerfully emotional story about a man and a woman who begin their lives at the beginning of the last century. They are an unlikely couple. She is a decent, caring woman, and her new husband is a bad-tempered man who is looking for the “big rock candy mountain,” yet they both love and support each other through their lives.

The emotional punch here is so strong I had to put the ‘pod down for a day a couple of times just so I could go on with it.

I have just finished Mad...more

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About Wallace Stegner

Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909—April 13, 1993) was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist. Some call him "The Dean of Western Writers."

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Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West

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“There was somewhere, if you knew where to find it, some place where money could be made like drawing water from a well, some Big Rock Candy Mountain where life was effortless and rich and unrestricted and full of adventure and action, where something could be had for nothing.” — 1 person liked it

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