I had no understanding of it while it was happening, did not comprehend either the deprivations or the advantages until acquaintance with other regions and older cultures began to define the terms of my identity for me, but from February 1909, when I was born on my grandfather's farm near Lake Mills, Iowa, to September 1930, when I boarded a bus in Salt Lake City to go "back east" to graduate school in Iowa, all the places I knew were western: North Dakota wheat towns, Washington logging camps, Saskatchewan prairie hamlets and lonely homesteads, and the cities of Seattle, Great Falls, Salt Lake, Hollywood, and Reno, with a lot of country seen on the fly between them.