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The spectator bird

Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "killing time before time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, had not been his choi...

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Main Author: Stegner, Wallace, 1909-1993 (Author)
Other Authors: Smiley, Jane (Writer of introduction)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, 2017.
Edition:First Vintage Books edition.
Subjects:
Older men > Fiction.
Diaries > Fiction.
Americans > Denmark > Fiction.
Danish Americans > Fiction.
Married people > Fiction.
Marriage > Fiction.
Denmark > Fiction.
Domestic fiction.
Psychological fiction.
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Summary:Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "killing time before time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, had not been his choice. He passes through life as a spectator. But a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he had taken years before. The memories of that trip to his mother's birthplace move through layers of time and meaning, and reveal that Joe Allston isn't quite spectator enough.
Physical Description:xvii, 204 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN:9780525431879
Author Notes:In 1972, Wallace Earle Stegner won a Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971), a novel about a wheelchair-bound man's recreation of his New England grandmother's experience in a late nineteenth-century frontier town. Stegner was born on February 18, 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa. He was an American novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and historian; he has been called "The Dean of Western Writers". He also won the US National Book Award in 1977 for The Spectator Bird.

Stegner grew up in Great Falls, Montana; Salt Lake City, Utah; and in the village of Eastend, Saskatchewan, which he wrote about in his autobiography Wolf Willow. Stegner taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University. Eventually he settled at Stanford University, where he initiated the creative writing program. His students included Wendell Berry, and Sandra Day O'Connor. The Stegner Fellowship program at Stanford University is a two-year creative writing fellowship. The house Stegner lived in from age 7 to 12 in Eastend, Saskatchewan, Canada, was restored by the Eastend Arts Council in 1990 and established as a Residence for Artists; the Wallace Stegner Grant For The Arts offers a grant of $500 and free residency at the house for the month of October for published Canadian writers.

Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 13, 1993, from a car accident on March 28, 1993.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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