Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West Book

Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs is a wonderful book by Wallace Stegner where he weaves his own writing and essays about his beloved West as well as the writings of other authors throughout this book, such as John Steinbeck, George B. Stewart, and Norman Maclean among others. In the Introduction, the author talks about his belief that the western wilderness is the geography of hope and that he has been shaped by the West, living most of his life there.

The book was divided into three sections, the first being Personal where Stegner explores his migratory childhood and his itinerant father. This section is intensely personal and one of the saddest, but a truly beautiful piece of writing, is the "letter, much too late" written to his mother on the eve of his eightieth birthday. There is also a chapter comparing the beautiful western wilderness to the Garden of Eden with many stunning literary descriptions.

"The best thing we have learned from nearly five hundred years of contact with the American wilderness is restraint, the willingness to hold our hand: to visit such places for our souls' good, but leave no tracks."

Habitat is the second section of the book where Wallace Stegner looks at the history of the western part of the United States and in addition to the mythology, beauty, legacy and magic of the region, the fragility of the arid and remote lands as more people migrate to the region.

"The Spanish of New Mexico, who also brought their origins with them, are in other ways an exception. Settled at the end of the sixteenth century, before Jamestown and Quebec and well before the Massachusetts Bay Colony, New Mexico existed in isolation, dependent largely on itself, until the newer Americans forcibly took it over in 1846; and during those two and a half centuries it had a high Indian culture close at hand to teach it how to live with the country."

In Witnesses, the third section of the book is a moving tribute to many writers in whose writings, Wallace Stegner felt had merit and perhaps had been overlooked. Most of the authors were from the West, but he also talked about the writings of Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Wendell Berry. In addition, Stegner discusses a lot of his books as well. It was a legacy to all of those amazing writers, including the author.

"It has been hard for the rest of the country to realize that the West incorporates not only cowboy-and-Indian fantasies but also the Hispanic Southwest, whose beginnings antedate Plymouth Rock by eighty years. The Grand Canyon was discovered by whites before the Mississippi was. And the Far East has been coming east to meet us and fuse with us for a long time now."