Wallace Stegner - (1909-1993)
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Hot Springs County High School in Wyoming
Read another essay on Wallace Stegner written by Montana student
Melissa Dillon.I. Biography
A novelist, historian, and environmental activist, Wallace Stegner was a major literary figure whose body of work mirrored his passion for the West and concern for social justice. Stegner
was someone as concerned about equality and social justice as about the wilderness and the environment, someone who was at home in East L.A., as he was rafting down the Colorado River.
Wallace Stegner was born on February 18, 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa on his grandfather's farm. He traveled from then on and lived successively in Iowa, North Dakota, Washington, Montana, and other surrounding states.
He was known as the heart and mind of the American West and as one of our finest writers. Over a 60-year career, Stegner wrote 30 books and a collection of essays that earned him a nomination for the National Book Critics Circle award for Living and Writing in the West, 1992.
Wallace went through high school and college in Salt Lake, and graduated from the state university in 1930. He earned two degrees, a M.A. and a Ph.D. after a few years of graduate work in California and Iowa.
In 1934, Stegner married Mary Stuart Page. Stegner dedicated his last book Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs to Mary. They had one son, Page Stegner, who is also a writer and professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Wallace Stegner died at age 84, on April 13, 1993 following an auto accident in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He left a legacy as a writer, professor, and environmentalist that once moved Edward Abbey to pronounce him "the only living American writer worthy of Nobel."
II. Professional Life
He taught at Augustana College, the universities of Iowa, Utah, and Wisconsin, and at Harvard.
Stegner had published a few stories when in 1937, Remembering Laughter won the Little Brown novelette contest. During his productive career, Stegner founded the creative writing program at Stanford University.
Wallace Stegner wrote mostly about the Old West. Although he was called "the dean of Western writers," not all of his fiction was set in the West. Crossing to Safety takes place in Wisconsin and Vermont, and The Spectator Bird is in California and Denmark. Many of his short stories have a variety of settings such as Vermont, Egypt, and South of France, even though his impact, historically and environmentally is Western.
Stegner wrote about the need to preserve the West, and he also fought for it. In 1960, he wrote his famous Wilderness Letter on the importance of federal protection of wild places. This was used to introduce the bill that established the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1964. His passion about the need to protect our wild places and his respect for our landscape are themes that Mr. Stegner eloquently expresses in many of his books and essays.
III. Environmental Paper
Wallace Stegner wrote mostly about the Old West. He became interested in the West as a child because his father had the pioneering itch in his bones and moved his family all
around the West. Wallace spent the majority of his childhood on the last frontier. He spent a lot of time observing the collection of bad men and drifters and Texas cowboys.
These five years in this rough life were the best Wallace ever had. This was the beginning of Stegner's long career as a writer and environmentalist to keep the West the was it was.
IV. Literary Works
(partial listing)
Fiction:
The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943)
Joe Hill (1950)
All the Little Live Things (1967) - Commonwealth Club Gold Metal
Angle of Repose (1972) - Pulitzer Prize
The Spectator Bird (1977) - National Book Award
Recapitulation (1979)
Cross to Safety (1987)
Collected Stories (1990)
Nonfiction:
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954)
Wolf Willow (1962)
The Sound of Mountain Water (1969)
Living and Writing in the West (1992)
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade: Living and Writing in the West (1993)
Principal Works:
Remembering Laughter (1937)
The Potter's House (1938)
On a Darkling Plain (1940)
Fire and Ice (1941)
Mormon Country (1942)
One Nation (1945); coauthored with the editors of Look
Second Growth (1947)
The Woman on the Wall (1950)
The Preacher and the Slave (1950)