‘Wallace Stegner and the American West’ tips hat to cultivated novelist

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By DICK HERMAN / For the Lincoln Journal Star

(“Wallace Stegner and the American West” by Philip Fradkin, Alfred A. Knopf, 370 pages, $27.50).

Who reads Wallace Stegner these days? Or a more appropriate question might be, how many deliberately search out Stegner’s once-popular novels, or his championing of the permanent value to Americans of our arid lands and measureless Western skies? The field for this genre is large, really. There are 30 different titles of works by Stegner in the Lincoln Public Libraries collection. That count is apt to expand. The 2009 centennial of Stegner’s Iowa birth is an event likely to be noted publicly in the academy and across literary circles. It probably even starts with this valuable work.

Widely honored in his time, the cultivated novelist came to an unexpected finish in 1993. He died as a result of an auto accident outside Santa Fe, N.M. The mishap was Stegner’s fault. “How could I have done this to you?” biographer Philip Fradkin reports the critically hurt Stegner confessed to his wife of nearly 59 years. After that lament, he didn’t have extended time to brood or make amends. He quickly succumbed.

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This new biography of “Wally” Stegner seems at once comprehensive and much researched. Philip Fradkin rightly examines an uncomfortable early family life in raw Saskatchewan (loved his mother, hated his father, a gambler and a bootlegger). Mostly, though, we tour those productive decades as a professor of creative writing. Fradkin recounts Stegner “got his big break at Bread Loaf (early in the history of the Vermont writing conference). He made contact that would elevate him from being an obscure assistant professor in a Midwestern university to a celebrated writer.”

Before happy and productive future decades at Stanford University, there’d been Socratic teaching of creative writing at what would grow into the famed Iowa Writers Workshop in Iowa City. There, Wilbur Schramm became a friend for life. Then came faculty postings at Harvard, Wisconsin, Utah and, lest the full record be shunned, a brief, reluctant stint of professorship at Augustana College. Finding a teaching job in Depression days always was chancy.

Nevertheless, contemporary readers surely will recognize a few headlined writers who were Stegner’s students: Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey, Barry Lopez, Ed Abbey and Wendell Berry (the latter “by far Stegner’s favorite of the many students who passed through the writing program over the years.”) Stegner was a determined writer independent of his university-related workshop duties. His was an admirable life of high industry. It led to a two-track career and many honorifics.

Given the character of the geography that nurtured him, Stegner’s bead on the West seems inevitable. To be sure, the Pulitzer Prize was awarded for “Angle of Repose,” a sprawling novel. “Between 1971 and 2007, sales of the book numbered 570,000 copies.”

Yet, in retrospect, “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian” arguably has a greater continuing impact. At the core of that work is the story of John Wesley Powell. Stegner’s personal environmental stance, his biographer submits, “was a direct outgrowth of Powell’s thoughts on the limitations of Western land and water and the success of the promotion-minded forces which eventually defeated him.” If Powell was a prophet warning about the need to treat the West with very special care, Wallace Stegner became a convinced, persuasive follower. In Stegner’s writings, we are beneficiaries several times over.

Dick Herman is a retired Lincoln Journal Star editorial page editor.