Annal:1977 National Book Award for Fiction

The Spectator Bird

Wallace Stegner

• 1977 NBA–Fiction winner
• Score: 10.27

Joe Allston is a retired literary agent whose parents and only son are dead, and who feels that he has been a mere spectator through life. Than a postcard from a friend causes him to return to the journals of a trip he took to his mother’s birthplace to search for his roots; memories of that journey reveal tha t he is not quite spectator enough.