Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909—April 13, 1993) was an American historian, novelist, short story writer, and environmentalist. Some call him "The Dean of Western Writers."

• See, Timeline of environmental events

Early life

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He was born in Lake Mills, Iowa and grew up in northern 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". While living in Utah, he joined a Boy Scout troop at a Mormon church (though he was not Mormon but Presbyterian himself) and earned the Eagle Scout award. He received his B.A. at the University of Utah in 1930. He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, and settled in at Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program. His students included Sandra Day O'Connor, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Ernest Gaines, and Larry McMurtry. He served as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. He was elected to the Sierra Club 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 won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. He also won the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird in 1977. He refused a National Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992 due to his opposition to the way the NEA had become politicized in the late 1980's.

He died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, while visiting the city to give a lecture. His death was the result of injuries suffered in an automobile accident on March 28, 1993. He is the father of nature writer Page Stegner.

Bibliography

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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 (1951)
• A Shooting Star (1961)
• All the Little Live Things (1967)
• Angle of Repose (1971)
• The Spectator Bird (1976)
• 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)
• Late Harvest: Rural American Writing (1996) (with Bobbie Ann Mason)

Chapbooks

• Genesis: A Story from Wolf Willow (1994)

Nonfiction

• Mormon Country (1942)
• One Nation (1945)
• 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)
• The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (1964)
• Teaching the Short Story (1966)
• 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)

Further reading about Stegner

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• 1984 Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work by Jackson J. Benson

Awards

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• 1937 Little, Brown Prize for Remembering Laughter
• 1967 Commonwealth Gold Medal for All the Little Things
• 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angle of Repose
• 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, Senior Fellow of the National Institute of Humanities, memberof National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters, member National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

References

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1. Stegner, Wallace, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs" Random House, 1992, back cover.
2. Honan, William H., "Wallace Stegner Is Dead At 84; Pulitzer-Prize Winning Author." New York Times, 15 April 1993, sec. B, p. 8.

External links

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• Essay on Stegner
• The Wallace Stegner Environmental Center website
• Wallace Stegner House
• Stegner's famed Wilderness Letter
• Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the S.J. Quinney College of Law - University of Utah

1909 births | 1993 deaths | American environmentalists | American novelists | California writers | Eagle Scouts | Historians of the Latter Day Saint movement | Pulitzer Prize winners | People from Iowa | Utah writers