Wallace Earle Stegner audiovisual collection, 1954-2008

Wallace Earle Stegner (1909-1993) was born on 18 February 1909, in Lake Mills, Iowa, the second son of Hilda Emelia Paulson and George Henry Stegner. He described his father as a man with the frontier characteristics of the late nineteenth century--a "boomer" who moved his wife and two sons from Iowa to North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, Wyoming, and in 1921, to Salt Lake City, Utah, always seeking fresh opportunities for quick financial success. Even in Salt Lake City, the family moved within the city several times. His mother, Stegner realized, was a "nester" who struggled to make a home for her husband and sons wherever they settled.

The years of moving kept the family close. Cecil, the eldest son, was athletic and active in team sports. Wallace was less so but participation in sports programs sponsored by the Mormon Church and ROTC training provided the focus and discipline for developing that aspect of himself and he played on the Freshman football team at the University of Utah. More importantly, he developed skill in tennis with then-coach, Theron S. Parmelee, and was a member of the University tennis team in 1929.

Stegner graduated from the University of Utah in 1930. He had been working for a local rug and linoleum company and it was his expectation that he would continue doing so. However, Sherman Brown Neff, head of the English Department, arranged a teaching assistantship at the University of Iowa enabling Stegner to do graduate work and to begin a different career direction.

Stegner received his master's degree from the University of Iowa in 1932 and planned to work toward a Ph.D. when his mother's struggle with cancer became critical. At that time his parents were living in Los Angeles, California. Stegner spent some time in Berkeley to be closer and to help with her care. Upon his return to Iowa, he completed the work on his Ph.D. which he received in 1934. On 1 September 1 1934, he married fellow student Mary Stuart Page. They moved to Salt Lake City where Stegner began teaching in the English Department at the University of Utah.

Their son, Stuart Page Stegner, was born in 1937. That same year Stegner won a Little, Brown and Company contest with his novelette,Remembering Laughter. Using the prize money, the Stegners traveled in France and England before moving to Madison, Wisconsin, where he had accepted a teaching position. Some of his Wisconsin experiences were later fictionalized inCrossing to Safety.

After two years in Madison, Stegner joined the faculty at Harvard University. During this period Stegner developed a friendship with Bernard DeVoto, which grew over the years, culminating in Stegner's writing a biography of DeVoto and editing a volume of DeVoto's letters. While at Harvard, Stegner completedThe Big Rock Candy Mountain, which was published in 1945. Other books published during this time wereOn a Darkling Plain, 1940;Fire and Ice, 1941; andMormon Country, 1942.

In 1945, the Stegners again moved west, this time to California. Stegner was offered a professorship in the English Department at Stanford University. He served as director of the Creative Writing Center from 1946 to 1971. Edward Abbey, Thomas McGuane, and Scott Momaday were writing fellows in this program. Other students he worked with included Larry McMurtry, Wendell Berry, Nancy Packer, Ken Kesey, and his son, Page Stegner.

After the Stegners moved to California they served as West-Coast editors for the publishing house of Houghton Mifflin in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the writers they recommended for publication was Stegner's cousin, Tom Heggen, author ofMister Roberts.

During the 1950s and early 1960s, the Stegners traveled extensively. During this time Wallace wrote a number of articles and produced the origins of novels to come. Wallace gave a number of lectures and taught for three months each at Stanford's overseas campuses in Austria and in England. In 1955, Wallace and Mary traveled to Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Syria where he worked on the history of the Arabian-American Oil Company, ARAMCO. Stegner wrote several articles for Aramco World, an industry publication. Later, in 1971, this material was published in book form under the title,Discovery.

Wallace Stegner's abilities as an editor led him to accept a number of responsibilities such as editor-at-large forSaturday Reviewand editor ofThe American West.

Fiction written by Stegner during the Stanford years includedSecond Growth, 1947;The Women on the Wall(a short story collection), 1950;The Preacher and the Slave, 1950 (reprinted in 1969 asJoe Hill: A Biographical Novel);The City of the Living(a short story collection), 1956;A Shooting Star, 1961;All the Little Live Things, 1967; andAngle of Repose, 1971.

Non-fiction written and published during the period included 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, 1962; The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail, 1964; and The Sound of Mountain Water(an essay collection), 1969.

Stegner retired from Stanford in 1971 to devote his time to writing and traveling. He had been thinking about the DeVoto biography for some time. This was published in 1974 as The Uneasy Chair, and was followed by The Letters of Bernard DeVoto in 1975. Also published following his retirement were The Spectator Bird, 1976; Recapitulation, 1979; American Places, written with Page Stegner, 1981; One Way to Spell Man, a volume of essays, 1982; Crossing to Safety, 1987; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, 1992.

The Stegners established two homes, a Vermont summer place and a home in Los Altos, California. Despite extensive travel, the homes provided Stegner with what he felt he had missed in his youth--a place that meant familiar work, friends, and landscape. These two locales and the Salt Lake City environs which he considered his hometown, are part of his writing, serving as background in novels and as visuals in his environmental efforts.

As he grew up in the arid regions of the West, Stegner developed a keen awareness of the fragility of the land. In his biographical research of Charles Dutton and later John Wesley Powell, he saw the western landscape as being fundamentally characterized by the scarcity of water resources. Stegner's concern found expression in activism directed at education of the public in the realities of living with the arid climate of the land west of the hundredth meridian. He felt other environmental problems would occur as multi-purpose land use increased. He wrote eloquently about these concerns in his letter to David E. Personen in 1960, now known globally as "The Geography of Hope: A Wilderness Letter." He served as wilderness advocate for the National Park Service, the Sierra Club, and the Wilderness Society. Some of the positions he held to address these concerns were: Co-Founder, Committee for Green Foothills in California, 1960; Special Assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, 1961; and Advisory Board, National Parks, Historical Sites, Buildings and Monuments, 1962-1965.

In addition to the prize for Remembering Laughter in 1937, Stegner received numerous other awards, among them an O. Henry first prize for short story in 1950, the Blackhawk award for Wolf Willow in 1963, the Commonwealth Club gold medal for All the Little Live Things in 1968, the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose in 1972, and the National Book award for The Spectator Bird in 1977. He was a Guggenheim fellow in 1950, 1952, and 1960; received a Rockefeller grant in 1950-1951; Fulbright in 1962 and 1968; and the Robert Kirsch award in 1980. Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs was nominated for the 1993 National Book Critics Circle award. Stegner refused the National Medal for the Arts which he was to have received in January of 1993 because he was "troubled by the political controls" he felt right wing groups placed on the National Endowment for the Arts.

Always a popular speaker, Stegner gave a number of speeches in Utah throughout the years. He gave the Dedicatory Address for the J. Willard Marriott Library at the University of Utah in 1968. He was the speaker at the Friends of the Library annual banquet in 1974. In 1980 Stegner gave a lecture titled "The Twilight of Self Reliance: Frontier Values and Contemporary Values" in the Tanner Lecture Series. He spoke at the Dedication of the Scott M. Matheson Wetlands Preserve, Moab, Utah, in 1991. In recognition of his close ties with Utah and his alma mater, Stegner designated Special Collections at the J. Willard Marriott Library, as repository for his papers in 197l. In 1995 the Stegner family granted permission to the University of Utah College of Law to rename its energy law center the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment.

In the spring of 1993, Wallace and Mary Stegner were in Sante Fe, New Mexico, to talk about his latest book, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. Stegner was seriously injured when the car he was driving was hit by another vehicle. He was hospitalized and seemed to rally, but after a relapse he died on April 13.