Lorna’s Reviews > Wallace Stegner and the American West > Status Update

". . . A mule deer buck with a rack like an elk takes off into the aspens just before the Forest Service lookout. Further west, a beaver dam and a lot of felled aspens lying crisscrossed in the woods."

-- Wallace Stegner's notes describing the Aquarius Plateau viewed southward from Boulder Mountain

"Aspens all around us on the overlook are shedding ice with a scolding sort of clatter; they sound like fussy women sweeping their porches clean of litter after a storm. Where they have not shed, they glitter in sheaths of white ice. The air pure, without haze; the sun warming up, the snow soft, the trail thawing in the ruts and against the north banks. . . . "

"Then Stegner brought his argument to a conclusion and gave it the resonance that would propel the last four words into the nature hall of fame: 'We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our santity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.'"

"Harriet Doerr was a Stegner Fellow in 1980, four years before publishing her first novel at the age of seventy-four. In reply to Stegner's congratulatory letter for winning the National Book Award in 1984 for 'Stones for Ibarra,' Doer wrote: 'Your letter made my day, and the day after, and the day after that. Thank you. . . . I'm extremely grateful to the Stanford writing program for taking me in and to you. . .'"

"In the foreward to a special edition in 1976, Wally explained, 'I wrote it because it happened to me; the significance I found later. A lot of myself is invested in that book. As I wrote pages of it, I couldn't see the typewriter for tears.'"

"Stegner needed to complete The Big Rock Candy Mountain . . . the book meant a lot to Wally, more than anything he had previously written and perhaps more than any book he would ever write. 'It is the only novel I have ever attempted in which I was completely and vitally interested,' he wrote in a 1942 application for a Guggenheim fellowship."