Crossing to Safety
For M.P.S., in gratitude for more than
a half century of love and friendship,
and to the friends we were both blessed by.
I could give all to Time except—except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There
And what I would not part with I have kept.
ROBERT FROST
WALLACE STEGNER
Wallace Earle Stegner, the award-winning novelist, biographer, historian, essayist, critic, environmentalist, and teacher who pursued the truths that lay behind the mythology of the American West, was born in Lake Mills, Iowa, on February 18, 1909. He grew up in countless boom-and-bust towns all over the West as his father shuttled the family through Saskatchewan, North Dakota, Washington, Montana, and Nevada before finally settling in Salt Lake City in 1921. Stegner entered the University of Utah in 1925 and started writing fiction while a graduate student at the University of Iowa in the 1930s. He began his teaching career at the University of Utah and later taught at both the University of Wisconsin and Harvard. From 1946 until his retirement in 1971 Stegner headed the prestigious creative writing program at Stanford, which has had a profound effect upon contemporary American fiction. Twice a Guggenheim Fellow, he was also a Senior Fellow of the National Institute for the Humanities as well as a member of the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Stegner made an auspicious literary debut in 1937 with
Remembering Laughter,
a rueful tale about an adulterous triangle in Iowa farm country that evoked comparisons with
Ethan Frome.
His next three novels—
The Potter’s House
(1938),
On a Darkling Plain
(1940), and
Fire and Ice
(1941)—disappointed reviewers. But he enjoyed widespread popular and critical success with
The Big Rock Candy
Mountain
(1943), a semiautobiographical chronicle of a nomadic family drifting through the West in search of an easy life that is always just out of reach. His other novels of this period include
Second Growth
(1947), a story about the conflict between puritanical values and modern morality in a New England town, and
The
Preacher and the Slave
(1950), a brilliantly imagined portrait of Joseph Hillstrom, the legendary outlaw and labor organizer who became a martyr following his execution for murder in 1915. After abandoning long fiction for more than a decade Stegner returned to novel writing with
A Shooting Star
(1961), the bestselling story of one woman’s hard-won triumphs over the irrational drives that have brought her to the edge of doom, and
All the Little Live Things
(1967), the tale of a New York literary agent who retires to California only to be engulfed by the chaos of the 1960s.
Meanwhile Stegner gained a whole new readership with his probing works of nonfiction. In
Mormon Country
(1941) and
The
Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail
(1964) he dramatically recounted the epic history of the Mormons. In
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
(1954), a biography of naturalist and explorer John Wesley Powell, he presented a fascinating look at the old American West as seen through the eyes of the man who prophetically warned against the dangers of settling it. And in
Wolf Willow
(1962), a memoir of his boyhood in southern Saskatchewan, he offered an enduring portrait of a pioneer community existing on the verge of the modern world.
Saturday Review
judged
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
and
Wolf Willow
“two of the most important Western books of the decade. . . . Both are so to speak geo-history, intensified, sharpened, made viable and useful by poetic insights and a keen intelligence.” Stegner’s enchantment with the West is reflected too in the essays collected in
The Sound of Mountain Water
(1969) and
One Way
to Spell Man
(1982), two volumes that also voice his frontline views on wilderness conservation. As Wendell Berry observed: “Stegner is a new kind of American writer, one who not only writes about his region, but also does his best to protect it . . . from its would-be exploiters and destroyers.”
Stegner was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
Angle of Repose,
which came out in 1971. “
Angle of Repose
is a long, intricate, deeply rewarding novel,” wrote William Abrahams in the
Atlantic Monthly.
“[It] is neither the predictable historical-regional Western epic, nor the equally predictable four-decker family saga, the Forsytes in California, so to speak. . . . For all [its] breadth and sweep,
Angle of
Repose
achieves an effect of intimacy, hence of immediacy, and, though much of the material is ‘historical,’ an effect of discovery also, of experience newly minted rather than a pageantlike recreation. . . . Wallace Stegner has written a superb novel, with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction.”
“
Angle of Repose
is a novel about Time, as much as anything— about people who live through time, who believe in both a past and a future,” remarked Stegner. “It has something to say about the relations of a man with his ancestors and his descendants. It is also a novel about cultural transplantation. It sets one man’s impulse to build and create in the West against his cultivated wife’s yearning for the cultural opportunities she left in the East. Through the eyes of their grandson (a man living today) it appraises the conflict of openness and change with the Victorian pattern of ingrained responsibilities and reticences; and in the entangled emotional life of the narrator it finds a parallel for the emotional lesions in the lives of the grandparents. It finds, that is, the present in the past and the past in the present; and in the activities of a very young (and very modern) secretary-assistant it reveals how even the most rebellious crusades of our time follow paths that our great-grandfathers’ feet beat dusty.”
Stegner enjoyed great critical acclaim for his next work,
The Un
easy Chair (1974), a full-scale biography of Bernard DeVoto, the historian, novelist, and ferociously funny critic of American society. “[This] book is full of dramatic episodes and offers, from a special point of view, a battlefield panorama of the literary world from 1920 to 1955,” said Malcolm Cowley. “[Stegner] is an ideal biographer for DeVoto. Their careers sometimes crossed. . . . Both were brought up in Utah. . . . And both, as Stegner says, were ‘novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us.’ ”
Time
agreed: “
The Uneasy
Chair
consistently goes beyond the limits of its subject to illuminate what it meant to be a writer in the America of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s.”
In 1977 Stegner won a National Book Award for
The Spectator
Bird
(1976), in which he again depicted literary agent Joe Allston, the protagonist of
All the Little Live Things.
Likewise in
Recapitulation
(1979) Stegner resurrected Bruce Mason, a character from
The Big
Rock Candy Mountain,
to assess the course his life has taken. “This is Stegner’s
The Sound and the Fury,
” said the novelist’s biographer Jackson Benson. “Like the Faulkner novel,
Recapitulation
is a book about time and its multiplicity of meanings in human experience, about the history of a family in its decline.” Stegner’s last novel,
Crossing to Safety
(1987), traces the turbulent, lifelong friendship of two college professors and their wives. “A superb book,” said
The
New York Times Book Review.
“Mr. Stegner has built a convincing narrative, has made survival a grace rather than a grim necessity, and enduring, tried love the test and proof of a good life. Nothing in these lives is lost or wasted, suffering becomes an enriching benediction, and life itself a luminous experience.”
Although Stegner is perhaps best known for his novels, he also garnered substantial acclaim and three O. Henry Awards for his short fiction. Over the years he published nearly fifty short stories in such magazines as
Harper’s
and the
Atlantic Monthly.
Some were reprinted in the collections
The Women on the Wall
(1948) and
The
City of the Living
(1956). In addition his work was often featured in editions of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards as well as the annual series
The Best American Short Stories.
“Stegner’s short fiction is unparalleled for the clarity and depth of its human insights,” remarked James Dickey. “This fact, coupled with the unobtrusive yet highly individual style that only he commands, places him among the masters by whom later practitioners of the form will be judged.” Upon publication of
Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner
in 1990, Anne Tyler noted: “Wallace Stegner has been steadily enriching readers’ lives for more than half a century. . . . His admirers will take him any way they can get him—novels, essays, biographies—but after sinking into these stories gathered from a ‘lifetime of writing,’ we can’t help but mourn the passing of his short-story days. These stories are so large; they’re so wholehearted. Plainly, he never set out to write a
mere
short story. It was all or nothing.” George Garrett concurred: “Every story in Stegner’s
Collected Stories
bears the indelible signature of an artist.”
Stegner’s final book,
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs,
another collection of essays about the West, came out in 1992. The
Los Angeles Times Book Review
deemed it “the essential Stegner . . . the brilliant crystallization of his lifetime of thinking about the American West.” Wallace Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 13, 1993, of injuries resulting from a car accident.
Marking
the Sparrow’s Fall,
a compilation comprising many of his unpublished essays about the West, appeared posthumously in 1998. As the
Los Angeles Times
observed: “The reader of Stegner’s writing is immediately reminded of an essential America. . . . A distinct place, a unique people, a common history, and a shared heritage remembered as only Stegner can.”
