1979 — Steve Anderson

In these thirteen stories, Steve Anderson captures what it meant to come of age in the late 1970s in working-class America. From a family's West Virginia oil wells to trekking through abandoned small-town factories, to a Nevada campground vacation, adolescents find love, strengthen friendships, and create adventures. Each story is tinged with the stark challenges and raw beauty of growing up in a rural, post-Vietnam world of shuttered mills and sprawling train tracks. Freedom comes from trying to purchase beer underage, stealing a friend's dad's rusted “work” car for a joyride, and creating the world's fastest sled for racing down a sheer quarry slope. There are stories of first love, captured against desert backdrops and in motel arcades. Most of all, this collection is about finding one's way to adulthood in a richly revealed time and place in America's Midwest.