Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers by Alex Beam

Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers by Alex Beam

In this brisk and riveting biography, Alex Beam takes readers on a journey through Wallace Stegner's life and complicated legacy as one of the twentieth century's best storytellers and chroniclers of the American West. 

In a career that spanned half a century, Stegner wrote fourteen novels and seventeen works of nonfiction. Reared on the Canadian-American frontier and educated in Salt Lake City, Utah, this quintessential Man of the West won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He landed a coveted teaching job at Harvard but, eager to get back to the West, left it for a professorship at Stanford.

Stegner was a full-throated environmentalist who served on the board of the Sierra Club, worked for the Secretary of the Interior, and wrote the famous Wilderness Letter on the healing power of open spaces. He founded Stanford University's legendary Stegner Writing Fellowship, where his students included Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Sandra Day O'Connor, Tillie Olsen, and Scott Turow.

In his later years Stegner wondered if he had lived too deep into the wrong century. He left Stanford when he felt students no longer accorded professors the respect they deserved, and later became embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that tarred his Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose.

Stegner ended his career with his valedictory masterpiece, Crossing to Safety. It was his rare Eastern novel, set in his adopted home of Greensboro, Vermont, where he chose to be buried.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781560855194
ISBN 10	1560855193
Title	Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers
Author	Alex Beam
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Signature Books
Year published	2025-02-18
Number of pages	100
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.