The Edge of Town1987–1993
West was thought to be a place to hunt down, dig up, chop down, drain off and dam and send the profits east and retire there. This Oasis will pass on into a mirage, leaving more than a few new scars on this vast arid landscape.Peter de Lory, prologue, Oakland, January 1994
Made along the arid lands of Nevada's Route 50 between 1987 and 1993, The Edge of Town reads the American West through Wallace Stegner's Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. The prologue was written in Oakland on January 27, 1994; the book was edited that year, never published, and republished on demand in 2022. Its company is the New Topographics generation — Richard Misrach, Mark Klett, Robert Dawson — and, further back, William Henry Jackson's 1867 survey of Pyramid Lake.