Leaders: Wallace Stegner

I always read with interest the mini-biographies which appear in John Gehl's NewsScan. Here is the story of Wallace Stegber, whom I knew and liked when he was at Stanford. At least one WAISer, Miles Seeley, was a student lf his.

Stegner died tragically in an automobile accident when he was returning from another institution, where he had received an honor:
"Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was a prolific writer whose novels center about life in the American West. Best known is his novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), a sprawling work describing a Norwegian family's struggle to establish a home in the West during the early 1900s. Other major titles by Stegner include The Preacher and the Slave (1950), a fictionalized account of labor leader Joe Hill; Angle of Repose (1971), a reconstruction of the life of Western novelist Mary Hallock Foote, for which Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize; the 1977 National Book Award winner The Spectator Bird (1976); and the semi-autobiographical novel Crossing to Safety (1987).

Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa. His father was a restless drifter who moved the family to the American northwest, ending up for a time in Salt Lake City, Utah, where Stegner attended high school. Although not a Mormon himself, Stegner developed a respect for Mormon culture and values that is reflected in several of his books. After attending the University of Utah, he entered the graduate program at the University of Iowa, earning an M.A. in 1932 and a Ph.D. in 1935 with a dissertation on Utah naturalist Clarence Dutton, published later by the University of Iowa Press. Stegner spent his next years teaching English at several colleges,also teaching for several summers at the Bread Loaf School of English in Vermont where he became friends with Robert Frost, Bernard DeVoto and Theodore Morrison. In 1945, he accepted a professorship in creative writing at Stanford University, remaining there until his retirement 26 years later.

The Stanford years were Stegner's most productive; he produced more than a dozen books in that period. Among his students in the creative writing program were Ken Kesey and Thomas McGuane. In 1950, he made an around-the-world lecture tour, researched his family's past in Norway and spent much of the year as writer-in-residence at the American Academy in Rome. Stegner was a regional writer in the best sense. He drew his settings, characters, and plots from the American West, but he was mainly concerned with the unique meaning of Western values and traditions.

See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/014016930X/newsscancom/ref=nosim