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Wallace Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa in 1909, and spent his childhood and young adult years living in various locations around the western U.S. Two of these locations seem to stand out in his writing: Saskatchewan and Salt Lake City. Stegner's book Wolf Willow concerned itself with accounting his childhood experiences in southern Saskatchewan and intertwining these stories with historical information about the area. In The Sound of Mountain Water Stegner talks about his first encounter with a mountain river and how after living on the prairie for his whole childhood the sight and sounds of this rushing water moved him greatly. Stegner's father also seems to have had a large impact on his writing. His father was a stern man who's relationship with his son was somewhat rocky throughout his life. He moved his family around often always searching for a better life, but for the most part this failed to materialize and the family remained quite poor throughout most of Stegner's childhood. This seems to have given Stegner's writing a hard sense of realism in portraying the harshness and beauty of the American west, as well as a good sense of it's social climate. Growing up in the west and always being on the move probably was the reason Stegner became so enamored with traveling in the region, and also affected the way he related to his environment. He was able to encounter many different types of landscapes and biomes, which gave him a sense of the social and physical geography of the region. .
In The Sound of Mountain Water Stegner writes mostly about the American southwest. He describes traveling to Havasu Canyon on horseback, rafting down the Colorado River through Glen Canyon and his subsequent visit to Lake Powell. He also reflects upon various other travels throughout the region and in "Coda" argues for increased wilderness preservation. Stegner's descriptions of the landscape mainly consist of passages dealing with the beauty and emptiness of the land.