Wallace Stegner and the American West

In his autobiographical novel Recapitulation (1979), Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) wrote of his character that "all his earliest years in Salt Lake had been an effort, much of the time as unconscious as growth itself and yet always there as if willed, to outgrow what he was and become what he was not. A stray, he yearned to belong. An outsider and an isolate, he aspired to friends and family and the community solidarity he saw all around him in that Mormon city" (41). In this comprehensive biography of Stegner, published to coincide with the centennial of his birth and written with the full cooperation of Stegner's only child, Page, Philip Fradkin shows just how true that was of his subject. Stegner's earliest years began in an orphanage in Seattle, the drought-stricken frontier prairie of Saskatchewan homesteaders, a year in Great Falls, Montana (where at age eleven he encountered his first flush toilet and bath tub), and then twelve years in Salt Lake City and the University of Utah: "the happiest years I ever knew or will know." His father was a gambler and a bootlegger who moved the family twenty times in ten years to avoid raids, a man with a violent temper who died in a murder-suicide. Stegner hated his father and inherited that temper. He was plagued by guilt over his mother's hard life, and devoted to Mary, his wife of fifty-nine years. Later years took Stegner to Harvard and then Stanford, where he founded the creative writing program and nurtured future writers like Wendell Berry and Larry McMurtry. Although he lived in the Stanford area for almost fifty years, he felt alienated from the university by the time he left, and a bitter argument led him to donate his papers to the University of Utah. A man who wrote eloquently about the power of place, he spent considerable time at a home in Vermont, which is where his ashes were spread after he died. Stegner won almost every literary award there is and his books have been translated into numerous languages, yet he was forever cast as a "regional" author and felt spurned by the east coast elites. His novel Angle of Repose won a Pulitzer in 1972 but was later mired in controversial and genuinely complex charges of plagiarism. Outwardly successful, Stegner was inwardly deeply insecure. As Fradkin points out in his introduction, the previous two biographies of Stegner in 1997 and 1996 were written by professors of literature. He paints with a broader brush and hangs his narrative on the three major components of Stegner's life and work -- Talented Teacher, Reluctant Conservationist, and Prominent Author. Fradkin honors Stegner but does not ignore the many contradictions in his life. Did he ever fit in or "become what he was not?" It's doubtful, Fradkin suggests; the autobiographical character Bruce Mason in Stegner's novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain asks, "But going home where. . . Where do I belong in this?" A bibliography of books by and about Stegner, along

I had been an avid reader of Stegner for many years and lost all my books in the hurricane Iniki on Kauai. After reading this book, I'm buying all my old books again. This book, in providing the story of Stegner's life and career, and his writing, awakens the desire to re-read those books I've previously owned, and to read all the new stories I haven't. If you like Stegner, you should own and read this book.Wallace Stegner and the American West

A simply marvelous work. It flows like a novel, contains references that enhance the work and never strays from the subject. Wonderfully executed. A very keen insight to a complex personality. It renewed my interest in reading the books by Stegner I haven't yet read and likewise, makes me want to read more of Philip Fradkin.

Because I am jaundiced I probably have no right to comment on this book. Although I taught environmental history for a decade or more, I couldn't quite place Wallace Stegner when a friend mentioned his name a few weeks before I became aware of Fradkin's biography. Somehow my mind came up with a jumble of Wallace Stevens and Robinson Jeffers. Then I saw the author in a book talk and caught a bit of the Stegner conference in Pt. Reyes Station CA. I am bothered by all the hullabaloo. The word that comes to mind is chauvinism, western chauvinism. I haven't read novels in 30 or 40 years, so what right have I to comment. But Fradkin mirroring Stegner is a western chauvinist, though Stenger seemed to reject that in his adoption of Vermont as a place of realized landscape dreams in contrast to the West, a place of failed dreams, exploitation, and abandonment. This chauvinism, which so bothers me in California (when I say that I like going to New England in the deep winter, Californians look at me as if I am mad), was there in the Pt. Reyes conference, a praise of the surrounding landscape neglecting the fact that it is one of the richest communities in the US and its preservation both as pseudo wilderness and agricultural community is a direct function of its gentrification. So what about the role of place? Stegner spent part of a childhood in southern Saskatchewan. Fradkin and Stegner would have us see that as the frontier a la Turner's hypothesis. Yet Turner's frontier had already closed and what Stegner's father was chasing was $2 a bushel wheat, a result of the prosperity after the turn of the century and then the demand created by WWI. Pointing to the massive creation of farms in those years was the revisionist historians' answer to the end-of-the-frontier theory. When the bottled up US was supposed to be turning on itself it was actually expanding at a rate equal to if not greater than before. Stegner's childhood in Saskatchewan influenced him but it is hard to see that in his pretty much middle class growing up and college years in Utah adorned with vacations fishing in the mountains near Salt Lake City. In reading Fradkin's biography, I have a hard time seeing the influence of those early years. In contrast, Farley Mowat's book about his childhood Born Naked: The Early Adventures of the Author of Never Cry Wolf a little further north is rooted in place and even as his father (like Stegner's) is peripatetic. Place is evident is a detailed description on nature and it effects on the author's life. From Utah, Stegner goes to Iowa where he is "'offended' by endless green of the Midwest." In his nostalgia he misses the nature which actually surrounded him. While Stegner was going to graduate school and teaching he is unaware that at the University the great ecologist Paul Errington was bringing the landscape of Iowa ponds alive in his studies of muskrats. He had a real sense of place. Fradkin's book is odd in that, besides S

Philip Fradkin, a Los Angeles Times reporter turned environmental historian, has given us a skillful biography of an important novelist, teacher, essayist, and environmental activist. Despite a tough childhood roaming the hardscrabble northern prairies and intermountain West, Stegner earned a Ph.D., taught at Harvard, and established Stanford University's creating writing program just after World War II. That program assembled a long list of fabulously gifted writers, and well before Stegner left it in 1971, he and his students (Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Thomas McGuane, Edward Abbey, Evan Connell, etc.) were thoroughly reimagining the literary West. Fradkin's work complements two earlier biographies by shifting the focus from Stegner's literary achievement to "the whole man ... set against the passing backdrops of his life." The attention to place is fitting, and Fradkin expertly reveals a canny, forthright figure in twentieth-century American letters. Highly recommended.