THE California writer Wallace Stegner is well known to readers for novels such as "Angle of Repose" and "Crossing to Safety." But Stegner had another dimension, as an advocate for a literary West -- especially the West of mountains and desert and big sky -- not often enough heard from.
The West, wrote Stegner -- who was born in 1909 in Iowa and grew up in Montana, Utah and elsewhere before settling in Northern California's Los Altos Hills until his death in 1993 -- was a place defined by its restlessness. It was a region, in other words, from which people largely moved on, with considerable literary consequences.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Tuesday, November 27, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 29 words Type of Material: Correction
Wallace Stegner: An article about author Wallace Stegner in Saturday's Calendar incorrectly gave the first name of Ron Carlson, who runs the fiction-writing program at UC Irvine, as Rob.
"Except in northern California," he wrote in the essay "The Sense of Place," "the West has never had a real literary outpouring, a flowering of the sort that marked New England, the Midwest, and the South. . . . [A] lot of what has been written is a literature of motion, not of place." He referred to books by Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac and pointed out that other classic Western novels, such as Norman Maclean's "A River Runs Through It," were odes to a West that had already vanished.
He founded the West's most prestigious writing program, the Stegner fellowships at Stanford University in 1946, and ran it through 1971. During this period, he shifted the center of gravity of the American literary world.
With the publication for the first time this month of Stegner's letters, edited by his son Page and published by Shoemaker & Hoard, his considerable ability to inspire, exhort and engage those around him -- on issues central to the West as well as many others -- is being given a new stage. Perhaps most striking to read today are his many letters that take up now-trendy environmental issues, including an eloquent and much-quoted 1960 missive that asserts, "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases."
The literary and the environmental were never far apart for Stegner. He wrote of his hope that the West would someday develop "a civilization to match its scenery," which meant not only artists and writers, but also readers, critics, journals and writing programs.
His students, many of whom became dedicated writers of the West, include Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, James D. Houston, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey, editor Gordon Lish, Larry McMurtry and Tillie Olsen.
