Wallace Stegner - (1909-1993)
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Read another essay on Wallace Stegner written by Iowa
student Jaymie Hostetter.
I. Biography Wallace Stegner, the Dean of Western Writers, was born on February 18, 1909 on a farm near Lake Hills, Iowa. He was the second son of George and Hilda Paulson Stegner.
He spent more than 55 of his years writing and teaching others to write. In Stegner's childhood, his father who was searching for easy riches shifted him from one
town to another. When Wallace was three, they moved from North Dakota to Washington. His first memory of his childhood was living in a tent in Redmond. Stegner's father went to
Canada and left Hilda to care for Wallace and his older brother. The only job Hilda could find was at the department store and that didn't bring in enough money. Finally, she had
to assign the boys to an orphanage. They spent the fall and winter in Iowa and then they moved to live with George in Saskatchewan. Stegner didn't get much of an education as a young boy. He went to school but was not
taught what he needed to know. So instead, he got his education from all of the books he read. Reading was all he really could do because the homestead was uneventful and lonely
for him and his brother. The books he read helped him put his life into a native context. Stegner won first prize in a gopher-killing contest as a boy but he later regretted that he
killed anything. His young life was divided into prairie work for 3-4 months of the year and homestead work for the other 8-9 months. His childhood was very isolated not only
physically because of the location of his house but emotionally from the lack of attention by his father and the isolation from other people. Stegner moved from Saskatchewan to Eastend where he explored as a boy and made a ton
of new friends. Not long after he moved to Eastend did his family pick up and move again. Their new location was Great Falls, Montana where he lived for 15 months. When they
first moved to Great Falls, he wasn't used to the city life. At school he was not only the smallest eighth grader but he was also at least 2 years younger than the other students. In
1921, he moved to Salt Lake City, Utah where he was greatly influenced by the Mormons but never became a part of their religion. He began playing all sports in high school but his favorite sport was tennis.
II. Education and Professional Life Stegner went to the University of Utah when he was only 16 years old. Vardis Fisher, one of his teachers and mentors, made him work very hard for his grades and he pushed
Wallace to his limits. Stegner's sophomore year all his A's turned to B's but his junior year he changed and started to work at his academics again. He made writing
contributions to the university's literary magazine but was never intending to become a writer. His senior year he dropped out for spring and winter quarters and graduated in 1930 instead of 1929.
His major turning point up to his senior year was a teaching assistantship at the University of Iowa in 1930. From there, he went on to teach at the University of Utah and the
University of Wisconsin where he decided that teaching would come second to his writing. On September 1, 1934, he married his love Mary Page and they had a boy named Page.
Stegner then got a job at Harvard where he only planned on teaching half time but in the middle of the year he had to replace a teacher for an advanced English class. In 1935, he got his PhD from the University of Iowa.
In 1945, Stegner got a job at Stanford University. He created a literary department there and was also the director of the university's writing program. His day as a teacher
included writing in the mornings, teaching a literary class or attending a seminar in the afternoons, and then the rest of his spare time was devoted to his students. He was an
inspirational teacher there for many years and made his students work hard for their grades; especially his son who he didn't want to show favoritism to so he gave him a B+
instead of the A that he deserved. He made many contributions to Stanford but unfortunately he retired in 1971. In 1950, he took a seven-month trip to Asia for a research
project. The sponsors would only pay for him and his wife to go so Stegner sold his land for $1500 in order for Page to be able to join them. III. Stegner's Works
Stegner first began writing articles and then he started writing books and short stories. His story writing was broken into two periods of time: 1938-1943 he wrote 18 stories and from
1947-1958 he wrote 15 stories. He wrote about the realities of the western life, like the violent mining towns, whiskey soaked cities, and the honest emotions of pain, loss, and
love. Not only did he write fiction but he also wrote nonfiction to restore the sense of real history. In the late 50's and early 60's, his short stories ended and articles increased. In
1967, he wrote 11 articles and in 1981, he wrote 14. A lot of these articles were because of his dedication to the environmental movement. Not only his articles but also his letters
and speeches on the destruction of the environment helped sway the nation into the Wilderness Act in September of 1964. Many of his student writers also became concerned with the land and made some short writings about it. Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for his book The Angle of Repose and won the National Book Award in 1977 for another book The Spectator Bird. He also won the
Honorary Doctorate from the University of Montana in 1987. In 1990, he was awarded the Pen USA West Lifetime Achievement Award. These are just a few of the many awards he was awarded in his lifetime.
IV. Stegner's Later Life Stegner loved the West and was disappointed with the changes that were being made. The wide-open west that he once knew was destroyed by cities. He called the West
"Hope's Native Home" and was most hurt by the changes that were being made because he knew the West from how it was when he was young. In 1989, Stegner's hip started to
disintegrate causing him fierce pain. He went to Bozeman in 1992 to inaugurate a chair in history named after him at Montana State University. In Bozeman he was given the
Freedom to Write Award by Pen USA West for his turning down of the National Medal for the Arts Award presented to him by President Bush. The Stegners were in Santa Fe, New Mexico, for an award from the Montana and Plains
Booksellers Association when on the night of March 28, 1993, they were in a car accident. The car hit them broadside smashing the driver's door panel. Stegner suffered from a
broken collarbone, all his ribs on the left side were broken, and his lungs collapsed. He was in Intensive Care but 2 days later the doctor had him up and walking around. On the
third day of his recovery, he had a relapse and got pneumonia. After that he suffered a heart attack and a possible stroke and died on April 12, 1993. V. Literary Works Novels Remembering Laughter~1937 Short Stories The Women on the Wall~1950
Histories Mormon Country~1981
Biographies, Autobiography, Letters and Interviews Beyond the 100th Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the 2nd opening of the West~1982 Essays
One Nation~1945 This essay was submitted by a student of Steve Gardiner, a teacher at Billings Senior High School in Billings, Montana
On a Darkling Plain~1939
Fire and Ice~1941
The Big Rock Candy Mountain~1983
Second Growth~1985
Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel~1980
A Shooting Star~1961
All the Little Live Things~1979
Angle of Repose~1971
The Spectator Bird~1976
Recapitulation~1979
Crossing to Safety~1987
The City of Living and Other Storied~1956
The Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner~1991
Discovery!~1971
The Gathering of Zion: The story of the Mormon Trail~1981
Wolf Willow: A history, a story, and a memoir of the Last Plains Frontier~1980
The Uneasy Chair: A biography of Bernard DeVoto~1974
The Letters of Bernard DeVoto~1975
Conversations with Wallace Stegner about Western Literature and History~1985
On the Teaching of Creative Writing~1988
The Sound of Mountain Water~1985
This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its magic rivers~1985
One Way to Spell Man~1982
American Places~1983
The American West as Living Space~1987
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs~1992