Wallace Stegner  Wallace Stegner once said about his writing, "In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth." Stegner's prose has inspired generations of Americans to seek their own truth.
In The Geography of Hope, A Tribute to Wallace Stegner, wrtitten by his friends, colleages, and his son, Page Stegner, we sense a far
greater resonance than a mere collection of memorial applause. "It is a book about what one man has taught us, by his example, about the accountable
life; a book about what it means to be a responsible, loving,
thoughtful, constituent of the human race. That is the only way he
would have it."
Wallace Stegner was born on February 18, 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa.
Over a 60 year career he wrote 30 books. Among the novels are, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All The Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); Angle of Repose, 1972 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, (National Book Award), 1977; Recapitulation, 1979; Collected Stories, 1990, and Crossing to Safety, 1987. The nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, (A History, A Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier), 1962; The Sound of Mountain Water, 1969; Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West, 1992, a collection of essays that earned him a nomination for the National
Book Critics Circle award.
Wallace Stegner
Although
Wallace Stegner is called "the dean of Western writers," not all of his fiction is laid in the West. One of his most successful novels, Crossing to Safety takes place in Wisconsin and Vermont. The Spectator Bird is in California and Denmark. All The Little Live Things is pure California, not typically Western. Many of his short stories have a
variety of settings: Vermont, Egypt, the South of France, as well as
the American West. His non-fiction, however, and one of his most eloquent
statements about the environment, The Wilderness Letter, are definitely Western. His impact, historically and environmentally, is Western.
Wallace Stegner
wrote about the need to preserve the West, and he also
fought for it. He became involved with the conservation movement in
the 1950's while fighting the construction of dam on the Green River
at Dinosaur National Monumen. In 1960 he wrote his famous, Wilderness Letter, on the importance of federal protection of wild places. This letter was used
to introduce the bill that established the National Wilderness Preservation
System in 1964. Wallace Stegner also founded the Committee for the Green
Foothills in Santa Clara County, California and was involved with The
Sierra Club and Wilderness Society. He also served as assistant
to the Secretary
of the Interior, Stewart Udall, during the Kennedy administration. There,
he worked on issues dealing with the expansion of National Parks. His
passion about the need to protect our wild places, and
his respect for our landscape
are a themes that Mr. Stegner eloquently expresses in many of his books
and essays.
In
1964 Stegner started the Creative Writing
Program at Stanford University, where he
served on the faculty until 1971. He also
taught at University
of Utah, University of Wisconsin, and Harvard University. His students include:
Wendell Barry, Larry McMurtry, Thomas McGuane, Ernest Gaines, John Daniel,
Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, and Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert
Haas. Mr. Stegner has twice been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Senior Fellow
of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He was a member of the National
Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Arts and Letters.
In 1992 he turned down the National Medal for the Arts because he was "troubled" by
the political controls placed upon the National Endowment for the Arts.
In 1934, Stegner married Mary Stuart Page. For 59 years they shared a "personal literary partnership of singular facility," wrote  Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. The dedication of Stegner's last book Where The Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, reads "For Mary...who, like Delsey has seen the first and the last, and been indispensable
and inspiriting all the way." They have a son, Page Stegner who is also a writer and professor at University
of California, Santa Cruz.
Wallace
and Mary Stegner
Mr. Stegner died at 84, on April 13, 1993 following an auto accident
in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He left a legacy as writer, professor, and environmentalist
that once moved Edward Abbey to pronounce him "the only living American writer worthy of the Nobel." Indeed, Stegner was one of the American West's preeminent historians and arguably
the most important of its novelists.
James Hepworth
The Quiet Revolutionary
THE WILDERNESS LETTER
From "Coda: Wilderness
Letter," copyright by Wallace Stegner, 1960.
Something will have
gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining
wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin
forests to be
turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if
we drive the few remaining members of the wild species
into
zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air
and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads
through
the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans
be free in their country from the noise, the exhausts,
the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that
never again
can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate,
vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment
of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the animals, part
of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any
remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without
chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong
drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New
World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need
wilderness preserved-- as much of it as is still left, and
as many kinds-- because it was the challenge against which
our character
as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance
that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even
if we never once in ten years set foot in it. It is good
for us when we are young, because of the incomparable sanity
it can bring briefly, as vacation and rest, into our insane
lives. It is important to us when we are old simple because
it is there–important, that is, simply as idea.
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