The author's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the story of four generations in the life of an American family. Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Wheelchair bound with a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need, he is nonetheless embarking on a search of monumental proportions: to rediscover his grandmother, now long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier. Like other great quests in literature Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. -- From back cover.