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Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers
In this brisk and riveting biography, Alex Beam takes readers on a journey through Wallace Stegner’s life and complicated legacy as one of the twentieth century’s best storytellers and chroniclers of the American West.
In a career that spanned half a century, Stegner wrote fourteen novels and seventeen works of nonfiction. Reared on the Canadian-American frontier and educated in Salt Lake City, Utah, this quintessential Man of the West won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He landed a coveted teaching job at Harvard but, eager to get back to the West, left it for a professorship at Stanford.
Stegner was a full-throated environmentalist who served on the board of the Sierra Club, worked for the Secretary of the Interior, and wrote the famous Wilderness Letter on the healing power of open spaces. He founded Stanford University’s legendary Stegner Writing Fellowship, where his students included Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Sandra Day O'Connor, Tillie Olsen, and Scott Turow.
In his later years Stegner wondered if he had lived too deep into the wrong century. He left Stanford when he felt students no longer accorded professors the respect they deserved, and later became embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that tarred his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose.
Stegner ended his career with his valedictory masterpiece, Crossing to Safety. It was his rare Eastern novel, set in his adopted home of Greensboro, Vermont, where he chose to be buried.
In a career that spanned half a century, Stegner wrote fourteen novels and seventeen works of nonfiction. Reared on the Canadian-American frontier and educated in Salt Lake City, Utah, this quintessential Man of the West won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He landed a coveted teaching job at Harvard but, eager to get back to the West, left it for a professorship at Stanford.
Stegner was a full-throated environmentalist who served on the board of the Sierra Club, worked for the Secretary of the Interior, and wrote the famous Wilderness Letter on the healing power of open spaces. He founded Stanford University’s legendary Stegner Writing Fellowship, where his students included Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Sandra Day O'Connor, Tillie Olsen, and Scott Turow.
In his later years Stegner wondered if he had lived too deep into the wrong century. He left Stanford when he felt students no longer accorded professors the respect they deserved, and later became embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that tarred his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose.
Stegner ended his career with his valedictory masterpiece, Crossing to Safety. It was his rare Eastern novel, set in his adopted home of Greensboro, Vermont, where he chose to be buried.
100 pages, Paperback
Published February 18, 2025
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About the author
Alex Beam
12 books85 followersI'm [still] a [part-time] columnist for the Boston Globe. Before that I worked as a business reporter in Los Angeles and Moscow. I've lived in Boston since 1984, and written for the newspaper since 1987. I'm working on my next book, about the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. I wish I still resembled that handsome photo, taken about a decade ago. UPDATE: Finished the Joseph Smith book (obviously) and have started turning over soil for my next project. UPDATE: Finished that project, a short, sharp book called "The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship." UPDATE The Nabokov-Wilson book got lovely reviews, and now I am days away from handing in the ms for my seventh book, my fifth work of nonfiction, the (true) story of Mies van der Rohe and his girlfriend/client/tormentor, Dr. Edith Farnsworth, for whom he built the Farnsworth House. (Please Google it - famous, beautiful house) ) UPDATE I ghost-wrote a book sometime in here, but alas under conditions of strictest secrecy. It was quite successful and I'd be happpy to do that kind of work again. I follow my Goodreads reviews, and would like to offer a collective Thank You to the men and women, who -- without exception, as far as I can see -- have offered literate, unbiased reactions to my writing. Thanks!
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 24, 2025
Wallace Stegner in many ways is the essential Western writer. He published multiple novels about the Western experience, an acclaimed biography of Colorado River explorer John Wesley Powell, wrote numerous essays on living in the West, and taught creative writing at Stanford to some of the 20th century’s best western writers. His “Mormon Country,” a history of the 1846/47 exodus from Nauvoo to Utah, was reportedly Gordon B. Hinckley’s favorite book. Stegner also won the Pulitzer prize for fiction in 1972, one of the first truly Western authors that garnered such national acclaim.
Alex Beam’s short biography of Stegner is notable for its brevity, coming in at only 91 pages. But Beam is not so much interested in telling the entirety of Stegner’s life, rather just how he came to epitomize Western literature in a way that no one before him had. I first encountered Stegner in college, reading in quick succession his great biography “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the American West,” his Pulitzer winner “Angle of Repose,” and “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey, one of Stegner’s students at Stanford. These volumes helped focus my view of the American West as something more than the John Wayne movies and the Bonanza-style TV series of my youth.
As Beam relates, Stegner’s upbringing was particularly Western, from his childhood on the Canadian prairies, his youth as the son of a bootlegger in Salt Lake City, and his long tenure teaching writing at Stanford University. In Stegner’s view, the west began at the 100th longitude where lush grasslands gave way to arid landscapes whose development depended not on rugged individualism but cooperative efforts at harnessing the limited water resources for the benefit of communities. Stegner may have moved to the comparative garden of California, but his heart never left the legacy of communal works that built dams, irrigation canals, and tamed the deserts of the Mountain West.
Stegner, Beam writes, especially appreciated the communal efforts of the Mormon pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who “adopted” him as a young man in Salt Lake City, encouraged him to participate with them in Boy Scouts and church basketball, and provided him an education at the University of Utah. Stegner never seemed to have been tempted to join the LDS church, but he credits them with giving him a surer foundation for a life than the fractious experience of his hard-scrabble childhood. After failing as a farmer, Stegner’s father looked for the next get-rich-quick scheme, which led him to relocate the family first from Saskatchewan to Seattle. There Stegner and his brother spent some time in a Catholic orphanage while his mother tried to keep the family afloat during one of Stegner’s father’s lengthy absences. The move to Salt Lake City also involved his father’s quest for quick profits from bootlegging during prohibition. To some extent, Stegner may have inherited some of his father’s attitudes, viewing writing as the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme. Stegner often took commissions writing outside his Western sensibility, such as a history of ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia. Once Stegner started selling his writing, he wrote continuously, completing what many consider his finest work, “Crossing to Safety,” published in 1986 when Stegner was 78 years old.
Stegner often felt alienated by the Eastern press and publishing world that had always looked down on him as a Western writer. His Pulitzer Prize winning “Angle of Repose” was a controversial choice, winning over titles from the likes of John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates. The New York Times didn’t even publish a review of the book at the time. Beam explains how Stegner became interested in the story of a strong feminist artist and writer married to a mining engineer whose work took them across the varied landscapes of the West in the late 19th century, and relied heavily on the writings, diaries, and letters of one Mary Hallock Foote, upon whom the central character is based. One of Foote’s granddaughters readily agreed to Stegner’s use of her writings, but when the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was adapted for an operatic adaptation for the 1976 Bicentennial, another granddaughter accused Stegner of plagiarism. Indeed, Stegner had used portions of Foote’s writings verbatim, assuming the family had given permission.
Despite the controversy, “Angle of Repose” contained some of the most riveting prose I had encountered to that point in my life. Whether the work was Stegner’s own, or if he recognized the beauty of Foote’s writing and included parts of it verbatim, the result is the same. I still remember pausing to take a breath after reading a paragraph describing a team of pack mules appearing out of an early morning fog. I’ve been a Stegner fan ever since.
Beam’s treatment of Stegner is brief, never intending to be a complete and comprehensive biography. Instead, Beam’s thesis is that Stegner redefined what Western American literature could be as a counterpoint to regional Southern literature and the elite Eastern works favored by the New York publishing establishment.. Beam gives particular credit to Stegner for teaching creative writing at Stanford. Among his many students were Ken Kesey, Scott Turow, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, and Wendell Berry. Kesey by his own admission absorbed what Stegner was teaching, but wanted to go beyond his teacher’s experience, which led Kesey to experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Stegner, fond of his Jack Daniel’s, disapproved of Kesey. Kesey, who worked on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while at Stanford, remembered Stegner as better than a teacher. “He was like Vince Lombardi, and we were the Green Bay Packers of fiction writing.” [p49]
Eventually, his experience working with writers like Kesey and the increasingly radical swing of Stanford’s students and faculty in the late 1960s caused Stegner to relocate out of his beloved West, where he had lived, written, and involved himself as an ardent conservationist. That service had included a friendship with Ansel Adams and a three year stint on the board of the Sierra Club. He moved to Greensboro, Vermont, where he wrote his last few novels, including “Crossing to Safety,” arguably his best work and last. He continued a long feud with the New York intelligentsia, at one point saying “…the more you stab your wife or throw big tantrums or big parties, the more your reputation seems to grow,” a crude allusion to Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. [p 78].
When his novel “The Spectator Bird” won the National Book Award for fiction, critics took aim at a perception that Stegner was writing like an old man about an old man’s concerns. Stegner himself continued to disassociate himself from contemporary writers and their influence. However, “Crossing to Safety”, his final novel, finally secured Stegner the recognition and acclaim from the Eastern press and publishing world. Even the New York Times called it “…a superb book at the end of a consistently accomplished career.” [p79] Although it changed their perception of Stegner, it still felt to him like an empty gesture, perhaps because in many ways, it is not primarily a Western novel as were most of his earlier works.
However, Beam notes, Stegner is in danger of disappearing from view. When asked if Stanford, Stegner’s teaching home for several decades, was still teaching any of Stegner’s works, author Tobias Wolff and Stegner fellow at Stanford replied “generally students don’t read him here. I wish they would.” His increasingly conservative view of modern society seems to have alienated him again in the literary establishment, making him once again an outsider. It’s a loss according to Beam. “Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers” is a step to remind us of the quality of his catalog of works. As I age myself, I look forward to revisiting “Angle of Repose”, “Crossing to Safety,” and other Stegner books to recapture the excitement and familiarity of a writer who lived in and breathed the same arid air as I did, and helped me gain a greater appreciation for the West and its own unique impact on the arts.
Alex Beam’s short biography of Stegner is notable for its brevity, coming in at only 91 pages. But Beam is not so much interested in telling the entirety of Stegner’s life, rather just how he came to epitomize Western literature in a way that no one before him had. I first encountered Stegner in college, reading in quick succession his great biography “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the American West,” his Pulitzer winner “Angle of Repose,” and “Desert Solitaire” by Edward Abbey, one of Stegner’s students at Stanford. These volumes helped focus my view of the American West as something more than the John Wayne movies and the Bonanza-style TV series of my youth.
As Beam relates, Stegner’s upbringing was particularly Western, from his childhood on the Canadian prairies, his youth as the son of a bootlegger in Salt Lake City, and his long tenure teaching writing at Stanford University. In Stegner’s view, the west began at the 100th longitude where lush grasslands gave way to arid landscapes whose development depended not on rugged individualism but cooperative efforts at harnessing the limited water resources for the benefit of communities. Stegner may have moved to the comparative garden of California, but his heart never left the legacy of communal works that built dams, irrigation canals, and tamed the deserts of the Mountain West.
Stegner, Beam writes, especially appreciated the communal efforts of the Mormon pioneers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who “adopted” him as a young man in Salt Lake City, encouraged him to participate with them in Boy Scouts and church basketball, and provided him an education at the University of Utah. Stegner never seemed to have been tempted to join the LDS church, but he credits them with giving him a surer foundation for a life than the fractious experience of his hard-scrabble childhood. After failing as a farmer, Stegner’s father looked for the next get-rich-quick scheme, which led him to relocate the family first from Saskatchewan to Seattle. There Stegner and his brother spent some time in a Catholic orphanage while his mother tried to keep the family afloat during one of Stegner’s father’s lengthy absences. The move to Salt Lake City also involved his father’s quest for quick profits from bootlegging during prohibition. To some extent, Stegner may have inherited some of his father’s attitudes, viewing writing as the ultimate get-rich-quick scheme. Stegner often took commissions writing outside his Western sensibility, such as a history of ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia. Once Stegner started selling his writing, he wrote continuously, completing what many consider his finest work, “Crossing to Safety,” published in 1986 when Stegner was 78 years old.
Stegner often felt alienated by the Eastern press and publishing world that had always looked down on him as a Western writer. His Pulitzer Prize winning “Angle of Repose” was a controversial choice, winning over titles from the likes of John Updike and Joyce Carol Oates. The New York Times didn’t even publish a review of the book at the time. Beam explains how Stegner became interested in the story of a strong feminist artist and writer married to a mining engineer whose work took them across the varied landscapes of the West in the late 19th century, and relied heavily on the writings, diaries, and letters of one Mary Hallock Foote, upon whom the central character is based. One of Foote’s granddaughters readily agreed to Stegner’s use of her writings, but when the book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and was adapted for an operatic adaptation for the 1976 Bicentennial, another granddaughter accused Stegner of plagiarism. Indeed, Stegner had used portions of Foote’s writings verbatim, assuming the family had given permission.
Despite the controversy, “Angle of Repose” contained some of the most riveting prose I had encountered to that point in my life. Whether the work was Stegner’s own, or if he recognized the beauty of Foote’s writing and included parts of it verbatim, the result is the same. I still remember pausing to take a breath after reading a paragraph describing a team of pack mules appearing out of an early morning fog. I’ve been a Stegner fan ever since.
Beam’s treatment of Stegner is brief, never intending to be a complete and comprehensive biography. Instead, Beam’s thesis is that Stegner redefined what Western American literature could be as a counterpoint to regional Southern literature and the elite Eastern works favored by the New York publishing establishment.. Beam gives particular credit to Stegner for teaching creative writing at Stanford. Among his many students were Ken Kesey, Scott Turow, Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, and Wendell Berry. Kesey by his own admission absorbed what Stegner was teaching, but wanted to go beyond his teacher’s experience, which led Kesey to experimenting with hallucinogenic drugs. Stegner, fond of his Jack Daniel’s, disapproved of Kesey. Kesey, who worked on “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest while at Stanford, remembered Stegner as better than a teacher. “He was like Vince Lombardi, and we were the Green Bay Packers of fiction writing.” [p49]
Eventually, his experience working with writers like Kesey and the increasingly radical swing of Stanford’s students and faculty in the late 1960s caused Stegner to relocate out of his beloved West, where he had lived, written, and involved himself as an ardent conservationist. That service had included a friendship with Ansel Adams and a three year stint on the board of the Sierra Club. He moved to Greensboro, Vermont, where he wrote his last few novels, including “Crossing to Safety,” arguably his best work and last. He continued a long feud with the New York intelligentsia, at one point saying “…the more you stab your wife or throw big tantrums or big parties, the more your reputation seems to grow,” a crude allusion to Norman Mailer and Truman Capote. [p 78].
When his novel “The Spectator Bird” won the National Book Award for fiction, critics took aim at a perception that Stegner was writing like an old man about an old man’s concerns. Stegner himself continued to disassociate himself from contemporary writers and their influence. However, “Crossing to Safety”, his final novel, finally secured Stegner the recognition and acclaim from the Eastern press and publishing world. Even the New York Times called it “…a superb book at the end of a consistently accomplished career.” [p79] Although it changed their perception of Stegner, it still felt to him like an empty gesture, perhaps because in many ways, it is not primarily a Western novel as were most of his earlier works.
However, Beam notes, Stegner is in danger of disappearing from view. When asked if Stanford, Stegner’s teaching home for several decades, was still teaching any of Stegner’s works, author Tobias Wolff and Stegner fellow at Stanford replied “generally students don’t read him here. I wish they would.” His increasingly conservative view of modern society seems to have alienated him again in the literary establishment, making him once again an outsider. It’s a loss according to Beam. “Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers” is a step to remind us of the quality of his catalog of works. As I age myself, I look forward to revisiting “Angle of Repose”, “Crossing to Safety,” and other Stegner books to recapture the excitement and familiarity of a writer who lived in and breathed the same arid air as I did, and helped me gain a greater appreciation for the West and its own unique impact on the arts.
April 21, 2025
Boston Globe writer Alex Beam does a great job of distilling various texts on the life of author/teacher extraordinaire Wallace Stegner into a pithy, enjoyable bio. From his youthful days among the Mormons to his long career as a novelist, essayist, and historian, and with forays into education, Stegner is sort of a writer's writer, more admired than read. There is real danger to your TBR pile in reading Beam's concise study -- You will want to pick up Stegner's books, as well as the other books mentioned. Does anyone read Vardis Fisher anymore?
July 14, 2025
A very short but interesting account of one of our best writers of the west. Beam provides an honest assessment of Stegner’s work, which varied from novels to short stories to essays to biographies and histories.
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July 15, 2025Really fascinating short biography that makes me want to give Stegner another chance. Had given up on him after reading All the Little Live Things.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews