American Places
Preface
Foreword
American Places
Inheritance
The Northeast Kingdom
Last Exit to America
The River
Dead Heart of the West
Crow Country
High Plateaus
The New Riders of the Purple Sage
The Redwood Curtain
There It Is: Take It
Life Along the Fault Line
Remnants
Unfinished Business
Bibliography
Index
Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa. The son of
Scandinavian immigrants, he traveled with his parents and brother
all over the West-to North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan,
Montana, and Wyoming-before settling in Salt Lake City in 1921.
Many of the landscapes he encountered in his peripatetic youth
figure largely in his work, as do characters based on his stern
father and athletic, outgoing brother. Stegner received most of his
education in Utah, graduating from the University in 1930. He
furthered his education at the University of Iowa, where he
received a master's and a doctoral degree. He married Mary Stuart
Page in 1934, and for the next decade the couple followed Wallace's
teaching career-to the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and
eventually to Stanford University, where he founded the creative
writing program, and where he was to remain until his retirement in
1971. A number of his creative writing students have become some of
today's most well respected writers, including Wendell Berry,
Thomas McGuane, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, Robert Stone, and
Larry McMurty.Throughout his career and after, Stegner's literary
output was tremendous. His first novel, Remembering Laughter, was
published in 1937. By the time of his death in 1993 he had
published some two dozen works of fiction, history, biography, and
essays. Among his many literary prizes are the Pulitzer Prize for
Angle of Repose (1971) and the National Book Award for The
Spectator Bird (1976). His collection of essays, Where the Bluebird
Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), was nominated for the
National Book Critics Circle award.
Although his fiction deals with many universal themes, Stegner is
primarily recognized as a writer of the American West. Much of his
literature deals with debunking myths of the West as a romantic
country of heroes on horseback, and his passion for the terrain and
its inhabitants have earned him the title 'The Dean of Western
Letters'. He was one of the few true Men of Letters in this
generation. An historian, essayist, short story writer and
novelist, as well as a leading environmental writer. Although
always connected in people's minds with the West, he had a long
association with New England. Many short stories and one of his
most successful novels, Crossing to Safety, are set in Vermont,
where he had a summer home for many years. Another novel, The
Spectator Bird, takes place in Denmark.
An early environmentalist, he actively championed the region's
preservation and was instrumental-with his now-famous 'Wilderness
Letter'-in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness Act. Honest and
straightforward, educated yet unpretentious, cantankerous yet
compassionate, Wallace Stegner was an enormous presence in the
American literary landscape, a man who wrote and lived with
ferocity, energy, and integrity.
Page Stegner is a Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the
University of California at Santa Cruz.
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