Tangle of Repose

Wallace Stegner is so commonly referred to as "the dean of Western writers" that no one remembers who said it first. "Our great citizen-writer," said author Barry Lopez in a tribute to Stegner. "The only living American writer worthy of a Nobel," wrote Edward Abbey before the 1993 death of Stegner, whose frontline work with the Sierra Club and the government on environmental issues in the 1960s rounded out his literary reputation to include activist and savior of the West.

Stegner's legacy, beyond his 16 books and countless short stories, essays, introductions and articles, includes the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the University of Utah; the Wallace Stegner Environmental Center in the San Francisco Public Library; the Stegner fellowships at the Creative Writing Program at Stanford, where Stegner taught Abbey, Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry in the writing program he created and served for 25 years, until 1971; and countless other awards and prizes that bear his name. After his death, the Sierra Club published the "The Geography of Hope," a tribute to Stegner that includes words by many well-known Western writers, from Ivan Doig to William Kittredge to Terry Tempest Williams. Under the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, he served as special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and as a member of the National Parks Advisory Board.

Stegner's integrity was revered, his reputation beyond reproach. Having already won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, he turned down a National Medal of the Arts from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992. "Government," he responded to the offer, "has no business trying to direct or censor the arts." His "Wilderness Letter" of 1960 has become something of a manifesto for wilderness preservation in the West. In Lopez's tribute to Stegner, he quoted Bertolt Brecht, from the play "Galileo," "Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes."

In the West, we defend our heroes until the bitter end, sometimes against all logic, intuition and fact, and don't take kindly to feet of clay. But in real life, great men and women make mistakes. And so it may be with Wallace Stegner.