The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard Devoto

The Uneasy Chair is a fine, friendly, but not uncritical, biography of one Pulitzer-Prize-winning author, Bernard DeVoto (1897-1955), by another, his colleague and fellow westerner Wallace Stegner (1909-1993). Stegner masterfully handles DeVoto's philosophy of literature and his unrequited professional yearnings. In no time the reader wonders why DeVoto failed to understand that his gift lay in nonfiction and not in novel writing. Stegner merely sketches DeVoto's family life, but DeVoto's personality is always on display, especially his compulsiveness and insecurity, the latter of which was so serious that it sporadically verged on panic.