Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work

Jackson J. Benson has in this volume produced a superb literary biography of one of America's most underrated writers. The book in many ways reflects some of Stegner's own qualities as a writer. Stegner, in his biography of John Wesley Powell, BEYOND THE HUNDREDTH MERIDIAN, emphasized that it was a biography of his professional, not personal, life. Although Benson does not neglect Stegner's personal life, the stress is very definitely upon his literary, academic, and environmental work. Benson does let us get to know Stegner the person, with his own quirks (he dislike of the sixties and youth counterculture, his love of Vermont, his avoidance of extremism, his love of community as opposed to rugged individualism), but unlike many modern biographers, he is not intent upon baring Stegner's inner life, warts and all. Benson, like Stegner, strives towards balance. In this he succeeds admirably.Stegner vividly emerges in this biography as a profoundly principled, disciplined, committed, and morally courageous individual. The product of an impoverished childhood, later recounted fictionally in his semi-autobiographical novel THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN, Benson chronicles Stegner's drive to become a writer. In a sense, the book covers an uneventful life. Stegner did not do a great deal beyond write, teach, and speak out on a variety of environmental issues. Benson explores his friendships with mentors such as Bernard DeVoto and Robert Frost, to friends both famous and unknown, to students such as Ernest Gaines, Wendell Berry, and Ken Kesey.Although primarily focused on Stegner's literary output as both a fiction writer and historian, Benson deals extensively with Stegner's work as a conservationist. Of all the major writers of the past century, Stegner almost certainly was more involved in environmental causes than any other. He did this not only through his writing, such as in his great biography of John Wesley Powell, but in his activities as part of the Sierra Club and in numerous environmental efforts, including working briefly as an advisor to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall.Most of all, this book created a portrait of a writer and human being worthy of respect. Stegner emerges as a good man, someone the reader would have enjoyed knowing. At this point in time, I have read only Stegner's book on Powell and ANGLE OF REPOSE, but between those two books and this excellent biography make me want to read a great deal more.

Wallace Stegner wrote about ordinary people trying to make sense of day-to-day existence. He wrote with an extraordinary clarity of description and dialogue that is best matched by the clear, keen air of the Western high country where he grew up. The reader will find no hyperbole in his books and no gratuitous violence or sex. He or she will find sorrow there and the ways of handling it that humans use to try to make sense of it. His books are explorations of the canyon lands of sorrow and of the ascent to the connections with other humans that require the forgiveness that makes our best solace in the face of regret. Professor Benson senses these themes and uses them as organizing principles in presenting Stegner's works as they map his life. The book is balanced in its presentations with no room for heroes, anti-heroes or villains of the stock variety, a reflection of both the author's scholarship and his subject's own approach to characterization. Jackson Benson's book, too, is the harvest of ten years research done carefully, using many contemporary sources including interviews with Wallace Stegner himself before his premature death after an auto accident in 1993. Professor Benson's writing style is fluid, clean and selfless as he gives us a portrait of a man who chronicled changes in America between the last of the frontier cowboys and the invention of cyberspace. It is the picture of a writer of the American West whose themes apply equally well anywhere on the globe that humans inhabit. This book is a fine introduction to Stegner's work for those who have never read him and a delightful comment, containing both criticism and appreciation, for those who have read Wallace Stegner and will enjoy a conversation with another, most astute, reader. It is another dip into the complexity of Wallace Stegner's fiction, essays and biographies and into the meaning in them that can be described as their author once described mountain streams: always running, always there. by Thomas Beresford, M.D., University of Colorado Health Sciences Center