Wallace Stegner, the Dean of Western Writers, and his famous Stanford students
Wallace Stegner said he had lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada, then spent his career explaining the American West. He won a Pulitzer for Angle of Repose, founded Stanford's creative writing programme, and counted Ken Kesey, Wendell Berry and Sandra Day O'Connor among his students.
Born in Lake Mills, Iowa, on February 18, 1909, he grew up in Great Falls, Montana, Salt Lake City and the Saskatchewan village of Eastend, the setting of his memoir Wolf Willow. A Lutheran, he still made Eagle Scout in a troop run by a Latter-day Saints church in Utah. He finished a degree at the University of Utah in 1930 and a doctorate at Iowa in 1935, and a year earlier married Mary Stuart Page, beginning a 59-year partnership that the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. admired as a rare literary collaboration.
After teaching at Wisconsin and Harvard he settled at Stanford, whose writing programme produced Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, Ernest Gaines and Robert Stone among many others; its two-year Stegner Fellowship still bears his name. In the 1940s he joined neighbours planning a cooperative housing development for university staff on a 260-acre ranch. When lenders and the Federal Housing Authority refused loans because three of the families were Black, the group dropped the project rather than exclude them.
His fiction drew prizes and quarrels. Angle of Repose, published in 1971, took the 1972 Pulitzer, but its use of uncredited passages from the letters of Mary Hallock Foote stirred lasting controversy. The Spectator Bird won the National Book Award in 1977, and the semi-autobiographical Crossing to Safety found a wide audience in 1987. Residents of Greensboro, Vermont, where he summered, were so offended by his portraits of them in Second Growth that he stayed away for years.
He was also a conservationist. He wrote a biography of John Wesley Powell, the explorer and water-conservation advocate, edited the Sierra Club book This Is Dinosaur used to fight dams in Dinosaur National Monument, advised Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and co-founded a group protecting the San Francisco Peninsula in 1962. In 1992 he turned down a National Medal, saying the arts endowment had become too political. He died on April 13, 1993, after a car accident in Santa Fe.
Source: Wallace Stegner
