Where the Blubird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), a collection of essays, is the last book Wallace Stegner published in a long and productive life of thinking and writing about the West. In the Introduction to the book, Stegner writes that the West at large is hope's native home, the youngest and freshest of America's regions, magnificently endowed and with the chance to become something unprecedented and unmatched in the world" (xv). These are inspiring and hopeful words for a man in his 80s, and in darker moods in the same book, when contemplating, for example, the desperate foolishness of water policy west of the hundredth meridian, Stegner repudiates them, saying of the West that "neither nostalgia nor boosterism can any longer make a case for it as the geography of hope" (98). The phrase "the geography of hope" is also Stegner's coinage, and when he says he can no longer make a case for the American West as its native home, he is arguing with himself, against himself, against himself, over the crucial tensions out of which he made his life's work. In the end, however, despite considerable pessimism about our historical, cultural, and political blunders, Stegner did think that people could come to belong to the land where they lived, rather than merely owning it, even a land as harsh as the West. The vitality of his history and criticism, and the force of his fiction and teaching about it, are testimony to an entire life spent in devotion to that idea.