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Nearly every morning before Wallace Stegner began his daily stint of writing, he warmed up his two-fingered typing regimen with letters to friends, colleagues, and editors. The 285 letters that Page Stegner (Wallace Stegner's son and only child) gathers in his collection reveal a multitalented, ambitious, and hard-working writer, teacher, and conservation spokesman. Topically organized, Page's volume includes letters from biographers and critics, about individual Stegner books, from friends and family, about Stegner's literary career and his years at Stanford, on history and historians, and about conservation.
Stegner's letters overflow with valuable insights, inviting turns of phrase, and abundant wit. About the shaping power of region, he writes to his earlier biographer, Jackson J. Benson: "I suppose I do subscribe to the notion that places … have a lot to do with the formation of character." To another correspondent he apologizes: "I am only slow as a sinful conscience." He confesses, too, his need to reread important books: "A leaky mind knows no mending, it has to be refilled over and over." Any writer victimized by a killer review would nod in vicarious delight at Stegner's comment that "reviewers are about their old proportion of stupids to wise men, illiterates to those can and do read."
Stegner's letters also illuminate his views on religion and morality. Early in his career Augustana College, a small Lutheran school in Illinois, fired Stegner "for being an atheist." "I guess I am an infidel at heart," Stegner told his sweetheart, Mary Page, who became his wife the following summer in 1934. Later he confessed that "ecology is as close to religious feeling as I'm likely to come." But on the need for upright human conduct he could be stern and almost puritanical—for himself and for others. He instructed his grandson Page to "obey the rules, remember your manners, and be a Good Camper." A stringent code of conduct and demanding tests of character were centrally important in Stegner's life, so he often prescribed and preached about those topics to family members and friends.
Page Stegner provides a brief introduction to his father's letters as well as abbreviated comments prefacing each of the eight sections of his book. The longest section brings together letters from "Special Friends and Family"; a shorter section on "Conservation" includes Stegner's remarkable "Wilderness Letter," dated December 3, 1960, first published as part of a commission report to Congress. The closing words of this famous letter— wilderness is "the geography of hope"—remain Stegner's most widely quoted. Page furnishes a few useful explanatory notes and a chronology of his father's life. Even more contextual background and additional notes would have been valuable for readers coming to Stegner for the first time.
In Wallace Stegner and the American West, Philip Fradkin deals primarily with three important facets of Stegner's life and career. First, he demonstrates how specific places shaped Stegner's life and character; second, he discusses Stegner's important role as a teacher of writing; and third, he treats selective parts of Stegner's literary career. Along the way, he also clarifies how and why Wallace Wallace Stegner became the leading voice of the American West from the 1960s into the 1990s—and perhaps remains so in the 21st century.
Fradkin isexplicit about his major purposes. Rather than emphasize Stegner's literary career, as previous biographers have, he is "more intrigued by the whole man … set against the passing backdrops of his life." This book, Fradkin adds, is "about a man and the physical landscapes he inhabited and how they influenced him." The author's discussions of Stegner's life-shaping links with East End, Saskatchewan, Salt Lake City, Stanford University, and the small town of Greensboro, Vermont, are particularly illuminating and convincing. Previous interpretations of Stegner have been too uncritical, Fradkin argues, and failed to deal with his temper, his tendency to hold grudges, and his inability to deal with change. These parts of Fradkin's biography might have upset Stegner, for he avoided dealing with the private lives of John Wesley Powell and Bernard DeVoto in his biographies of those two men. He also blocked and held at a distance interviewers who tried to raise questions about his own private life.
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