Remembering Laughter, Wallace Stegner (Little, Brown & Co., 1937) ****

If you haven't read a Stegner novel yet, you might want to start with his first novel , Remembering Laughter, published in 1937. It won him Little Brown's Novelette prize of $2500, a magnificent sum in those days for a struggling English instructor whose wife, Mary, was only days away from delivering their first child, Page. Out of print for many decades, the novella was recently re-released last year in paperback by Penguin Books. The story relates how the loneliness and beauty of a remote Iowa farm affect a young woman who has just come there to live with her older married sister. She becomes attracted to her sister's husband, who drinks too much, but treats her very kindly, and the story grows out of these circumstances.