WITH JOHN SANFORD IN MONTECITO

John Sanford’s house, in a bucolic Montecito canyon, is uncluttered by files, notebooks, diaries or outlines. The bookcases are crowded, but there’s space on the walls and desk to spare. An inch-thick packet of admission slips to the Santa Barbara university library is the only evidence of the prodigious reading absorbed and distilled into the innumerable separate vignettes which his histories comprise; vignettes so highly charged with emotional energy that they generate the internal magnetism to make a cohesive American chronicle.

The autobiographical material is produced without the aid of albums or scrapbooks on a manual typewriter that, from the looks of it, could be a loaner from the Smithsonian’s collection of early 20th-Century American artifacts. Sanford has typed his entire literary output on it “with one finger.” Why not buy a word-processor? “But I am a word-processor,” he says, leaving no doubt that another would be redundant.

Midway through “A Good Land to Fall With,” Sanford describes his method. “I sit down before a blank sheet of paper, and that’s the last thing I remember. I go into a trance, I guess, and when I come out of it, there’s writing on the paper, some of it passable and some of it not. . . . Whether we know it or not, we all draw on ourselves for what we’ve seen, done, heard, imagined; on our stock, our savings, and we use it till it’s gone.”

Happily for American letters, the supply is self-replenishing.