Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner | |
---|---|
Born | Wallace Earle Stegner February 18, 1909 Lake Mills, Iowa, USA |
Died | April 13, 1993 Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA | (aged 84)
Occupation | Historian, novelist, short story writer, environmentalist |
Language | English |
Nationality | American |
Period | 1937–1993 |
Notable awards | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1972, Angle of Repose) National Book Award for Fiction (1977, The Spectator Bird) |
Spouse | Mary Stuart Page (1911–2010) |
Children | Page 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".[1] He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972.
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".[2] Stegner summered in Greensboro, Vermont. While living in Utah, he joined a Boy Scout troop at an LDS 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 Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he received a master's degree in 1932 and a doctorate in 1935.[3]
In 1934, Stegner married Mary Stuart Page. For 59 years they shared a 'personal literary partnership of singular facility,' in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr.[4] Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 13, 1993, from injuries suffered in an automobile accident on March 28, 1993.[5]
Stegner's son, Page Stegner, is a novelist, essayist nature writer and professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz. Page is married to Lynn Stegner, a novelist.[6][7] Page co-authored "American Places" and edited the 2008 Collected Letters of Wallace Stegner.[8]
Career
Stegner taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University. Eventually he settled 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, 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 and 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.
Stegner's novel Angle of Repose (first published by Doubleday in early 1971) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972, and was directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote (first published in 1972 by Huntington Library Press) 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.[9][10] But note that Stegner used only unpublished archival letters in his novel and he explained this briefly at the beginning of Angle of Repose. 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 because he believed the NEA had become too politicized.
Stegner's 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, who was the first man to explore the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and later served as a government scientist and advocate of water conservation in the American West. Stegner wrote the foreword and edited "This Is Dinosaur," with photographs by Philip Hyde, a Sierra Club book that was used in the campaign to prevent dams in Dinosaur National Monument and helped launch the modern environmental movement. 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 its publication.[11]
Legacy
On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Stegner's birth, Timothy Egan reflected in The New York Times on the writer's legacy, including his perhaps troubled relationship with the newspaper itself. Over 100 readers including Jane Smiley offered comments on the subject.[12]
One commenter to The Times, Stephen Trimble, a 2008–2009 Wallace Stegner Fellow at the University of Utah's Tanner Humanities Center, drew attention to the broader Utah birthday tribute to Stegner through leading conversations about Stegner’s work in communities across Utah.[13] Gov. Jon Huntsman's declaration of February 18, 2009 as Wallace Stegner Day highlighted Stegner as "one of Utah's most prominent citizens...a legendary voice for Utah and the West as an author, educator, and conservationist...[who was] raised and educated in Salt Lake City and [at] the University of Utah, [and] possess[ed] a lifelong love of Utah’s landscapes, people, and culture."[14] See more on the Utah centennial tributes at www.stegner100.com.
In recognition of Stegner's legacy at the University of Utah, The Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental or American Western History was established in 2010 and is administered by the University of Utah Press. This book publication prize is awarded to the best monograph the Press receives on the topic of American western or environmental history within a predetermined time period.[15]
The Stegner Fellowship program at Stanford University is a two-year creative writing fellowship. The house Stegner lived in from ages 7 to 12 in Eastend, Saskatchewan, Canada was restored by the Eastend Arts Council in 1990 and established as a Residence for Artists.[16] In 2003, indie rock trio Mambo Sons released the Stegner-influenced song "Little Live Thing / Cross to Safety" written by Scott Lawson and Tom Guerra, which resulted in an invitation for Lawson to serve as Artist-in-Residency for March 2009.
In May 2011, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Stegner's Los Altos Hills home, which was sold in 2005, is scheduled to be demolished by the current owners. Lynn Stegner said the family attempted to sell the home to Stanford University in an attempt to preserve it, but the university said the home would be sold at market value, customary for real estate donated to Stanford. Wallace Stegner's wife, Mary said that Wallace would disapprove of the fuss surrounding the issue. In addition, when the town wanted to name a path after him, he said "No." [17]
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)
- The American West as Living Space (1987)[18]
- 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 (Stegner and the editors of Look magazine) (1945), Houghton Mifflin
- 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)
- Wilderness Letter (1960), "helped win passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964," per Utah Gov. Huntsman in 2009.[14] See also Timeline of environmental events. Full text of letter at The Wilderness Society Web site. Retrieved 2-24-09.
- 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)
Short Stories
- "Bugle Song" (1938)
- "Chip Off the Old Block" (1942)
- "Hostage" (1943)
Awards
- 1937 Little Brown Prize for Remembering Laughter
- 1945 Houghton-Mifflin Life-in-America Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for One Nation[19]
- 1950–1951 Rockefeller fellowship to teach writers in the Far East[19]
- 1953 Wenner-Gren Foundation grant[19]
- 1956 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellowship[19]
- 1967 Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for All the Little Live Things
- 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angle of Repose
- 1976 Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for The Spectator Bird
- 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 (1949 and 1959[19]), Senior Fellow of the National Institute of Humanities, member of National Institute and American Academy of Arts and Letters, member National Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The Encyclopedia of World Biography reports that the Little Brown prize was for "$2500, which at that time was a fortune. The book became a literary and financial success and helped gain Stegner [the] position ... at Harvard."[19]
Notes
- ^ Evelyn Boswell (2006-10-05). "New Stegner professor to hit the ground running". Montana State University News Service. Retrieved 2007-09-09.
- ^ Stegner, Wallace, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs" Random House, 1992, back cover.
- ^ William H. HOnan, "Wallace Stegner Is Dead at 84; Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author," New York Times, April 15, 1993.
- ^ Wallace Stegner Biography. by James R. Hepworth The Quiet Revolutionary. Retrieved 2-24-09.
- ^ "Wallace Stegner Is Dead At 84; Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author." Honan, William H., New York Times, 15 April 1993, sec. B, p. 8. Link retrieved 2-19-09.
- ^ "Lynn Stegner Interview: Wallace Stegner Documentary" John Howe, interviewer; KUED-TV, n.d. Retrieved 2-19-09
- ^ Biography: Lynn Stegner University of Nebraska Press. Retrieved 2-19-09.
- ^ "The power of his pen - The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner" Review by Susan Salter Reynolds, LA Times, Nov. 18, 2007. Retrieved 3-12-09.
- ^ Mary Ellen Williams Walsh, 'Angle of Repose and the Writings of Mary Hallock Foote: A Source Study,' in Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner, edited by Anthony Arthur, G. K. Hall & Co., 1982, pp. 184-209.
- ^ "A Classic, or A Fraud? Plagiarism allegations aimed at Stegner's Angle of Repose won't be put to rest" by Philip L. Fradkin, Los Angeles Times, 3 February 2008, sec. M, p. 8. Link upgraded 2-19-09.
- ^ Joseph Gresser, "Wallace Stegner’s birthday celebrated with a hike and some talk, The Chronicle (Barton, Vermont), September 20, 2009.
- ^ "Stegner’s Complaint" by Timothy Egan, "Outpost" blog, The New York Times, Feb. 18, 2009 10:00 pm. Retrieved 2-19-09.
- ^ http://isotope.usu.edu/pages/issues/issue_7.1/trimble.html Retrieved 12-1-09.
- ^ a b stegner100.com Stegner Centennial Utah Web site. Retrieved 2-24-09.
- ^ "Stegner Prize". University of Utah Press. Retrieved 2011-06-29.
- ^ Stegner House Web site. Retrieved 2-24-09.
- ^ Whiting, Sam (2011-05-14). "Wallace Stegner's studio destined for demolition". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2011-05-14.
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(help) - ^ Derives from a series of three William W. Cook Lectures delivered at the Law School of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor on October 28,29 an 30, 1986. ISBN 0-472-06375-8
- ^ a b c d e f "Wallace Stegner" Encyclopedia of World Biography. Thomson Gale. 2004. Retrieved 2-24-09.
References
- Topping, Gary. Utah Historians and the Reconstruction of Western History. 2003, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Oklahoma. ISBN 0-8061-3561-1
Further reading
- 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
- 1984 Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work by Jackson J. Benson
- 1991 "A Perspective on Wallace Stegner" by Patricia Rowe Willrich (Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring 1991, pp. 240–259)
- 1998 Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner by James R. Hepworth (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, # ASIN: B0014JC0I6)
- 2007 "Wallace Stegner's Formative Years in Saskatchewan and Montana" by Philip Fradkin ("Montana The Magazine of Western History," Winter 2007, Vol. 57, No. 4, pages 3-19)
- 2007 "A Residual Frontier Town: Wallace Stegner's Salt Lake City," by Robert C. Steensma ("Montana The Magazine of Western History," Winter 2007, Vol. 57, No. 4, pages 20-23)
- 2007 Wallace Stegner's Salt Lake City by Robert C. Steensma, 224 p., University of Utah Press, ISBN 0-87480-898-7, ISBN 978-0-87480-898-8.
- 2008 Wallace Stegner and the American West by Philip L. Fradkin
- 2008 The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner Page Stegner, ed., 480 p., Counterpoint LLC/Shoemaker & Hoard (publ.), ISBN 1-58243-446-8, ISBN 978-1-58243-446-9.
External links
- Template:Worldcat id
- James R. Hepworth (Summer 1990). "Wallace Stegner, The Art of Fiction No. 118". The Paris Review.
- The Wallace Stegner Environmental Center website
- Books by Wallace Stegner: An Annotated Bibliography
- Website for PBS Wallace Stegner documentary
- Web site for Wallace Stegner at Marriott Library, University of Utah
- Wallace Stegner's West at California Legacy Book Series
- Wallace Stegner Bio from San Francisco Public Library
- Wallace Stegner Bio on Answers.com
- 2 short radio segments of Stegner's writing from California Legacy Project Radio Anthology (scripts and audio)
- Profile of Stegner marriage, on Beyond the Margins
- 1909 births
- 1993 deaths
- People from Winnebago County, Iowa
- American environmentalists
- Sierra Club
- American novelists
- American Presbyterians
- Eagle Scouts
- Guggenheim Fellows
- Harvard University faculty
- Historians of the American West
- Historians of the Latter Day Saint movement
- Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni
- People from Great Falls, Montana
- People from Orleans County, Vermont
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winners
- Stanford University faculty
- Writers from California
- Writers from Iowa
- Writers from Utah
- University of Iowa alumni
- University of Utah alumni
- University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty