Wallace Stegner
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Wallace Earle Stegner (1909-1993) was an American novelist and environmentalist. Called by some "The Dean of Western Writers." He grew up in northern Montana, Salt Lake City,Utah and southern Saskatchewan, about which he writes in his novel/autobiography Wolf Willow. He received his B.A. at the University of Utah in 1930.
Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972 and 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 government involvement in the arts.
He taught at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, and eventually settled in at Stanford University in California, where he founded the creative writing program. His students included 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 is also the father of nature writer Page Stegner.
Works
- 1937 Remembering Laughter
- 1942 The Big Rock Candy Mountain (novel)|The Big Rock Candy Mountain (autobiographical)
- 1954 Beyond the Hundreth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West
- 1962 Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier novel/autobiography
- 1971 Angle of Repose
- 1976 The Spectator Bird
- 1987 Crossing to Safety
About Stegner
- 1984 Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work by Jackson J. Benson
Awards
- 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angle of Repose
- 1977 National Book Award for The Spectator Bird
- 1992 National Endowment for the Arts (refused)