This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind
Ivan Doig, 1979
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780156899826
Summary
Memoir. This work introduced a major modern author to the reading public. Ivan Doig grew up along the rugged rims of the Rocky Mountains in Montana with his father, Charlie, and his grandmother, Bessie Ringer. His life was formed among the sheepherders and characters of small-town saloons and valley ranches as he wandered beside his restless father. The prose of this memoir is as resonant of the landscape of the American West as it is of those moments in memory which determine our lives.
What Doig deciphers from his past is not only a sense of the land and how it shapes us, but also of our inextricable connection to those who shape our values in the search for intimacy, independence, love and family. This magnificently told story is at once especially American and quietly universal in its ability to awaken a longing for an explicable past. (From the author's website.)