Wallace Stegner

Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909—April 13, 1993) was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist, often called "The Dean of Western Writers".

Among his many literary prizes are the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971) and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976). His collection of essays, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award.

He was the founder and 25-year director of Stanford University's creative writing program, In 1945 Stegner was recruited by Stanford University to create and run a graduate program in creative writing. He led the Stanford Creative Writing Program until his retirement in 1971.

Early life

Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa and grew up in Great Falls, Montana, Salt Lake City, Utah and southern Saskatchewan, which he wrote about in his autobiography Wolf Willow. Stegner says he "lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada". While living in Utah, he joined a Boy Scout troop at a Mormon church (although he himself was a Presbyterian) and earned the Eagle Scout award. He received a B.A. at the University of Utah in 1930. He also studied at the University of Iowa.

Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa. The son of Scandinavian immigrants, he traveled with his parents and brother all over the West-to North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, and Wyoming-before settling in Salt Lake City in 1921. Many of the landscapes he encountered in his peripatetic youth figure largely in his work, as do characters based on his stern father and athletic, outgoing brother. Stegner received most of his education in Utah, graduating from the University in 1930. He furthered his education at the University of Iowa, where he received a master's and a doctoral degree. He married Mary Stuart Page in 1934, and for the next decade the couple followed Wallace's teaching career-to the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and eventually to Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program, and where he was to remain until his retirement in 1971. A number of his creative writing students have become some of today's most well respected writers, including Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, Robert Stone, and Larry McMurty.

Teaching

Stegner taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University, eventually settling at Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program. His students included Sandra Day O'Connor, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Simin Daneshvar, George V. Higgins (who disliked Stegner intensely and felt him to be a poor teacher^{[citation needed]}), Thomas McGuane, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Gordon Lish, Ernest Gaines, and Larry McMurtry. He served as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. He was elected to the Sierra Club's board of directors for a term that lasted 1964—1966. He also moved into a house in nearby Los Altos Hills and became one of the town's most prominent residents.

In 1960 Stegner wrote his famed "Wilderness Letter", originally a private communication with his peers on the board of the Sierra Club. He closed by saying, "We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

The letter was read at the Sierra Club's Seventh Biennial Wilderness Conference, and later published in full in the Washington Post. It was an important impetus to the growing national consensus that led to the Wilderness Act of 1964, which created the legal definition of wilderness in the United States, and protected some 9 million acres of Federal land.[1]

Works

Stegner's novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972, and was directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote (later published as the memoir A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West). Stegner's use of uncredited passages taken directly from Foote's letters caused a continuing controversy. Stegner also won the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird in 1977. In the late 1980s, he refused a National Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992 because he believed the NEA had become too politicized.

His non-fiction works include "Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West" (1954), a biography of John Wesley Powell, the first man to explore the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and his subsequent career as a government scientist and advocate of water conservation in the American West.

A substantial number of his works are set in and around Greensboro, Vermont, where he lived part-time. Some of his character representations (particularly in Second Growth) were sufficiently unflattering that residents took offense, and he did not visit Greensboro for several years after that.

Death

Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico on 13 April 1993, from injuries suffered in an automobile accident on March 28, 1993.

His son, Page Stegner, is a nature writer and professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz.

Legacy

In 1990, the Wallace Stegner House, Eastend, Saskatchewan, Canada, was restored by the Eastend Arts Council and established as a Residence for Artists. The House is available as a Writer/Artist’s residence for stays from one week to up to eleven months.

The house that Wallace Stegner lived in from age 7 to 12. The one and half story house was built in 1917 by his father and the family lived here until 1921 when they moved to Montana.[2]

The Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment, established by the University of Utah's S. J. Quinney College of Law plans to celebrate the centennial of Stegner’s birth on February 18, 1909, with it's 14th Annual Symposium, “Wallace Stegner: His Life and Legacy.” The symposium will bring together a select group of former Stegner fellows, writers, and poets; conservationists; historians; public officials; and others who will explore Stegner’s life and his ongoing influence on subsequent generations.[3]

John Howe's new biographical film on Wallace Stegner, which premieres Feb. 2 at 9 p.m. on KUED Channel 7, and will be used in a variety of upcoming centennial celebrations of the famous Western writer's life.

Actor Peter Coyote narrates the well-done hourlong documentary, which features interviews with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, the late Edward Abbey, ex-U.S. Department of Interior secretaries Bruce Babbitt and Stewart Udall, environmentalist and river guide Martin Litton and biographer Phillip Fradkin.

The Stegner Fellowship program is a two-year creative writing fellowship at Stanford University. The award is named after American Wallace Stegner (1909—1993), an historian, novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, and Stanford faculty member who founded the university's creative writing program. Ten fellowships are awarded every year, five in fiction and five in poetry. The recipients do not need a degree to receive the fellowships, though many fellows do have MFA degrees in Creative Writing. No degree is awarded after the two-year fellowship.

The Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental and American Western History $10,000 Book Publication Prize, Presented by the University of Utah Press The Wallace Stegner Prize will be awarded annually to the best monograph submitted to the Press.

Bibliography

Novels

• Remembering Laughter (1937)
• The Potter's House (1938)
• On a Darkling Plain (1940)
• Fire and Ice (1941)
• The Big Rock Candy Mountain (autobiographical) (1943)
• Second Growth (1947)
• The Preacher And the Slave aka Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel (1950)
• A Shooting Star (1961)
• All the Little Live Things (1967)
• Angle of Repose (1971) - Pulitzer Prize
• The Spectator Bird (1976) - National Book Award
• Recapitulation (1979)
• Crossing to Safety (1987)

Collections

• The Women On the Wall (1950)
• The City of the Living: And Other Stories (1957)
• Writer's Art: A Collection of Short Stories (1972)
• Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner (1990)
• Late Harvest: Rural American Writing (1996) (with Bobbie Ann Mason)

Chapbooks

• Genesis: A Story from Wolf Willow (1994)

Nonfiction

• Mormon Country (1942)
• One Nation (1945)
• Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954)
• Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (autobiography) (1955)
• The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (1964)
• Teaching the Short Story (1966)
• The Sound of Mountain Water (1969)
• Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil (1971)
• Writer in America (1982)
• Conversations With Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature (1983)
• This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country And Its Magic Rivers (1985)
• American Places (1985)
• On the Teaching of Creative Writing (1988)
• The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard Devoto (1989)
• Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, 'Living and writing in the west', (autobiographical) (1992)

Further reading about Stegner

• 1982 Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner, edited by Anthony Arthur, G. K. Hall & Co.
• 1983 Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature, Wallace Stegner and Richard Etulain, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City

Awards

• 1937 Little, Brown Prize for Remembering Laughter
• 1967 Commonwealth Gold Medal for All the Little Live Things
• 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angle of Repose
• 1977 National Book Award for The Spectator Bird
• 1980 Los Angeles Times Kirsch award for lifetime achievement
• 1990 P.E.N. Center USA West award for his body of work
• 1991 California Arts Council award for his body of work
• 1992 National Endowment for the Arts (refused)

Plus: Three O. Henry Awards, twice a Guggenheim Fellow, Senior Fellow of the National Institute of Humanities, member of National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters, member National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Benson, Jackson J. 1996. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Viking. ISBN 0670862223
• Fradkin, Philip L. 2008. Wallace Stegner and the American West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 9781400043910
• Rankin, Charles E. 1996. Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ISBN 0826317413
• Stegner, Wallace Earle, Page Stegner, and Mary Stegner. 1996. The Geography of Hope: A Tribute to Wallace Stegner. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books. ISBN 0871568837
• Stegner, Wallace Earle, Michael Keller, Page Stegner, Mary Stegner, Jackson J. Benson, James Robertson, Carolyn Robertson, and Yolla Bolly Press. 1996. Catching the Light: Remembering Wallace Stegner. [Palo Alto, Calif.]: Stanford University Libraries. ISBN 0911221158
• Topping, Gary. Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History. 2003, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma. ISBN 0-8061-3561-1

External links

• Wallace Stegner Wallacestegner.org.
• Essay on Stegner
• The Wallace Stegner Environmental Center website
• Wallace Stegner House
• Stegner's "Wilderness Letter," Greenfoothills.org.
• Artist-Author Mary Hallock Foote and her Angle of Repose
• Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the S.J. Quinney College of Law - University of Utah
• Wharton, Tom. 2009. Stegner biography to air on Channel 7 Sltrib.com.
• Books by Wallace Stegner: An Annotated Bibliography
• Story of Stegner's Aramco book
• Barnes & Noble- Overview & editorial reviews for "Crossing to Safety"
• Wallace Stegner Biography - SFPL.
• Website for PBS Wallace Stegner documentary
• Wallace Stegner centennial blog

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