Wallace Stegner Essay - UniversalEssays

Custom Writing Services

This sample Wallace Stegner Essay is published for informational purposes only. Free essays and research papers, are not written by our writers, they are contributed by users, so we are not responsible for the content of this free sample paper. If you want to buy a high quality essay at affordable price please use our custom essay writing service.

Whether writing about the American West directly in his nonfiction or indirectly in his novels and short stories, Wallace Stegner explored such themes as the effect of the past on the present and the importance of place and history in defining cultural origins. Concerned with questions of personal identity and how one achieves stability amid the impermanence and dislocation of the modern world, Stegner’s writing is grounded in a realism that connects readers to the land. An environmentalist whose works were influential in wildlife preservation legislation, Stegner emphatically voiced his belief that the land must be respected if humanity is to have any hope of surviving on it.

Works in Biographical and Historical Context

A Nomadic Childhood

Wallace Earle Stegner was born in the rural community of Lake Mills, Iowa, on February 18, 1909. He spent most of his childhood moving from place to place—Utah, North Dakota, Washington, Montana, Wyoming—while his father searched for the perfect get-rich-quick scheme in areas that had only recently been frontier lands. After living in East End, Saskatchewan, Canada, for six years, Stegner’s family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, a town that provided the twelve-year-old Stegner with the social, cultural, and intellectual stimulus denied him by his father’s wanderings. For Stegner, his father became a role model for many characters in his books: characters who relentlessly seek personal gain without any consideration for whom or what they destroy in the process.

A Writer’s Education

Stegner attended the University of Utah, where he served as editor and contributor to the university’s literary magazine. He was also hired as a freelance writer for the Salt Lake Telegram. After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1930, Stegner accepted a teaching assistantship from the University of Iowa and entered a graduate program in creative writing. Stegner earned a master’s degree in 1932, remaining at the university for doctoral work. His mother’s death in 1933 after a lengthy struggle with cancer affected him greatly, as she provided her family some sense of cohesion as Stegner’s father moved them across prairies and mountains. In the months before she died, she continued to showthe strength and determination that Stegner later recalled through many of his female characters, especially in his portrait of Elsa in The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943).

Writing Success

In 1934 Stegner married Mary Stuart Page, a graduate student he had met at the University of Iowa. After earning his doctorate from Iowa in 1935, he began teaching at the University of Utah and publishing short stories in various journals. A book contest sponsored by the publishing house Little, Brown first prompted Stegner to try his hand at writing a novel. His entry, Remembering Laughter (1937), won the top prize of $2,500. The book became a literary and financial success and helped gain Stegner a position as an instructor at Harvard University, where he taught composition from 1939 to 1945.

Over the next five years, Stegner published several short novels exploring the relationships between individuals and their communities, as well as a nonfiction account of the Mormon culture. None of his early books achieved the success of his first novel until The BigRock Candy Mountain appeared in 1943. Largely autobiographical, this novel tells the story of a family’s travels over the American and Canadian West as the father, obviously based on Stegner’s own, endlessly searches for the opportunity that will make him a quick, easy fortune.

Environmentalism

At the end of World War II, Stegner returned to the West and became a professor of English at Stanford University in California. At Stanford, he instituted what would become one of the most prestigious writing programs in the country, serving as its director until 1971 and establishing himself as his generation’s most outstanding writing instructor. After publishing the nonfiction work One Nation (1945), an award-winning book criticizing the racial and religious lines that were being drawn in the United States at the time, Stegner was convinced by a friend who was an editor at Harper’s magazine to write an article about the environmental threats to U.S. public lands. The following year, Stegner published a biography of John Wesley Powell, a Colorado River explorer. The book gained the attention of David Brower, who asked Stegner to help write and edit This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers (1955) for the Sierra Club. Sent to members of Congress, the book revealed the natural beauty of Dinosaur National Monument between Colorado and Utah and succeeded in thwarting plans to build dams that would have destroyed it.

In 1960 Stegner wrote his famous Wilderness Letter, originally delivered as a speech to the University of California’s Wildlands Research Center, which was conducting a national wilderness inventory for a presidential commission. Stegner’s message became a mission statement hailed by conservationists around the world, and it was used to introduce the bill that established the National Wilderness Preservation System in 1964. Stegner’s involvement in environmental causes increased when he served as an assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, in 1961. In 1962 Udall appointed Stegner to the National Parks Advisory Board. This was followed by a three-year term on the board of directors of the Sierra Club, an organization Stegner profoundly affected during his forty-year association with its causes. The environmental movement gained momentum a few years later, with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1969 and the passage of the Clean Air Act the following year. Stegner became one of the movement’s leading literary figures.

Always a Writer

Despite great efforts in the conservation movement, Stegner considered himself first and foremost a writer. In 1972 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Angle of Repose, a work that tells the story of a retired history professor in California who is editing the papers of his grandmother, a writer and illustrator of the nineteenth century. This blending of past and present is vital to Stegner’s major works and was apparent again in The Spectator Bird (1976), which won the 1977 National Book Award for Fiction. Stegner continued to write both fiction and nonfiction until his death on April 13, 1993, from injuries received in a car accident in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Works in Literary Context

Stegner’s childhood experiences traveling around the West and the respect he developed for the wilderness while living in Saskatchewan had an immense influence on his literary involvement in environmental and social issues. However, he was more than a writer and an environmentalist; he was perhaps the most highly regarded writing instructor of his time. In addition to owning his body of work, Stegner’s legacy is remembered in the works of other writers whom he instructed at Stanford, a list that includes Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey, Wendell Berry, Ernest Gaines, and Robert Hass.

Setting

The settings of Stegner’s works are of utmost importance, for they illustrate the connections between people and the land. In Second Growth (1947), for instance, Stegner’s descriptive talent delivers the beauty of the New England countryside with the same precision and realistic detail seen in his Western settings. In doing so, Stegner develops a sharp contrast between the wildness of the natural environment and the social restrictions found in New England village life, as the young people in Stegner’s town find little room for cultural or spiritual growth independent of their natural surroundings. In ”Goin’ to Town” (1940), one of the many stories acknowledging one’s relation to the earth as a healthy antidote to the daily disorder that separates people from place, Stegner frames the story’s increasingly chaotic set of events between a boy’s peaceful connections to the earth. The boy starts the morning by tracking across the damp ground of his yard, noticing how smoothly his foot fits into the earth. After a tumultuous chain of events throughout the day, the boy finds his morning footprint and realigns his foot within its outline, and Stegner leaves him intimately bound to the earth.

In delivering a solid experience of place, Stegner portrays the earth as a force to be respected and admired. The conception of nature as a central force is especially apparent in Stegner’s later fiction, which reflects the same environmental concerns addressed in his nonfiction. Although A Shooting Star (1961) focuses on the relationship between a mother and daughter as they confront their personal weaknesses, what offers the mother the most hope is her growing awareness of the environmental necessity to preserve and protect land from commercial exploitation. In many ways, she fictionally argues the case Stegner was making more overtly through his nonfiction publications. More complex than AShooting Star is Stegner’s Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962), a work that integrates both real and fictionalized personal recollections with geographical and historical facts to reconstruct the Saskatchewan region Stegner knew as a boy. Most importantly, the work makes a case for knowing as well as preserving the environment.

Works in Critical Context

”Stegner is a regional writer in the richest sense of that word,” maintains reviewer James D. Houston, ”one who manages to dig through the surface and plumb a region’s deepest implications, tapping into profound matters of how a place or a piece of territory can shape life, character, actions, dreams.” While many would agree with critic Daniel King who says that Stegner is ”the greatest writer of the West,” others assert that he is much more than that. Indeed, Richard H. Simpson (quoted on the Web site bookrags.com) contends that Stegner’s ”main region is the human spirit” and that each one of Stegner’s novels ”explores a question central in Stegner’s life and in American culture: How does one achieve a sense of identity, permanence, and civilization—a sense of home—in a place where rootlessness and discontinuity dominate?” Stegner scholars Merrill and Lorene Lewis agree: ”The central theme of all his work is the quest for identity, personal and regional, artistic and cultural.”

The Big Rock Candy Mountain With the publication of The Big Rock Candy Mountain in 1942, Stegner achieved his first popular and critical success and established himself on the literary scene. More fully developed than its predecessors, the novel chronicles the lives of a family that continuously travels across the American and Canadian West as the father, convinced he will find a place where opportunity awaits him, seeks to make his fortune. According to Merrill and Lorene Lewis, The Big Rock Candy Mountain is ”more than the dream of … Success. It is the ‘dream of taking from life exactly what you wanted,’ and the quest for the Promised Land.”

Overall, The Big Rock Candy Mountain was a critical and popular success. Reviewer Orville Prescott concludes that the novel ”is a sound, solid, intelligent, interesting novel, a good story and an excellent interpretation of an important phase of American life,” while Robert Canzoneri deems The BigRock CandyMountain ”a once-in-a-lifetime book.” Critics have particularly praised Stegner’s handling of character. Reviewer Milton Rugoff, for example, observes that through the character of Bo Mason, ”Wallace Stegner conveys to us a vividness and a fullness hardly less than that with which we know our own fathers.”

References:

Arthur, Anthony, ed.Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Lewis, Merrill, and Lorene Lewis. Wallace Stegner. Boise, Idaho: Boise State College, 1972.
Robinson, Forrest G., and Margaret G. Robinson. Wallace Stegner. New York: Twayne, 1977.
Canzoneri, Robert. ”Wallace Stegner: Trial by Existence.” Southern Review 9 (October 1973): 796-827.
Eisinger, Chester E. ”Twenty Years of Wallace Stegner.” College English 20 (December 1958): 110-116.
Houston, James D. ”Wallace Stegner.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (March 7, 1993): 12.
King, Daniel. ”Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work.” World Literature Today (Winter 1998): 22-23.
Peterson, Audrey C. ”Narrative Voice in Stegner’s Angle of Repose.” Western American Literature 10 (Summer 1975): 125-133.
Prescott, Orville. ”Review of The Big Rock Candy Mountain.” Yale Review (Winter 1944): 189.
Bookrags Staff. Wallace (Earle) Stegner. Retrieved December 3, 2008, from http://www.book rags.com/biography/wallace-earle-stegner-dlb/. Last updated in 2005.