Support for the Radio West podcast comes from Harmon's Grocery, with a selection of handcrafted party trays for Thanksgiving hosts as well as attendees, including everything from artisan cheeses to a variety of desserts.

Wallace Stegner was one of the best interpreters of the American West.

He wrote novels and biographies and histories about the place.

In books like Mormon country, The Gathering of Zion, An Angle of Repose,

he explored the landscape of the region, along with the myths and the moral tensions.

In a new compact biography, the writer and journalist Alex Beam explores the complicated

legacy of Stegner's life and work. And it turns out many of his ideas about the West

were formed during his years in Salt Lake City, where he came of age, living among

the Latter-day Saints. Salt Lake City is one of the central settings for Stegner's first major success,

his novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain. The book follows the wandering Mason family across the

northern plains and into Utah, and the main character is a restless drifter and opportunist, modeled on Stegner's own father.

Stegner said he invested a lot of himself in that story.

Here's Alex Beam.

Wallace Stegner was a young, struggling, academic,

selling stories for money, eating food out of cans,

barely supporting his wife and young son,

and spending all of his late 20s and early 30s

working on what he would perceive to be his magnum opus, the Big Rock Candy

Mountain, the title of which is kind of a slur, like a negative homage to his father, George

Stegner, whom he despised. George Stegner was always sort of pursuing the fast buck, the Big Rock Candy Mountain at the end of the horizon.

And the narrator of the Big Rock Candy Mountain is Wallace Stegner as Bruce Mason the son.

But the big story is about Bow Mason,

...