Wallace Stegner and the American West [DECKLE EDGE] (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From The New Yorker

Stegner, born in Iowa in 1909 and brought up on a Saskatchewan dirt farm, may have been our last frontier writer. As Fradkin notes in this astute biography, it was a miracle that he didn’t write pulp Westerns. Instead, Stegner took as his subject the failure of his father’s homestead, built on denial of the most fundamental Western reality: drought. Stegner’s fiction stalked the slow disintegration of the family as closely as previous potboilers tracked cattle; and he transformed his father’s subsequent rambles—bootlegging the family from the dry northern plains to drier Mormon counties—into a founding narrative stronger than any ultra-violent "revisionist" Western. Whether as novelist, conservationist, or teacher, Stegner showed how the West has "a way of warping well-carpentered habits, and raising the grain on exposed dreams."
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From Booklist

Environmental historian Fradkin’s previous books about the West focus on sagebrush and stagecoaches, earthquakes and rivers. He now portrays a western writer who mapped the paradoxes of the New West. Fradkin has a deep affinity for Wallace Stegner (1909–93) and makes superb use of Stegner’s evocative writing, including passages never before published. Adept at seeding every scene with myriad details, he follows Stegner from the Saskatchewan prairie, where nature was his narrative, to Utah, where he became a “public library addict.” Stegner’s prizewinning fiction comes under close scrutiny as Fradkin explicates Stegner’s profound insights into the way nature shapes the human condition. Fradkin writes with particular zest about Stegner’s conservation work with Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and the Sierra Club, and assesses the enormous influence of Stegner’s “environmental classic” Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954). Fradkin’s dynamic and probing portrait of Stegner brilliantly combines literary and environmental history, and provides a fresh and telling perspective on the rampant development of the arid West, and Stegner’s prophetic warnings of the complex consequences. --Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1 edition (February 12, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400043913
• ISBN-13: 978-1400043910
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #525,705 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Adroit Biography of a Major Figure, March 9, 2008

By	Peter Richardson (San Francisco Bay Area) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Philip Fradkin, a Los Angeles Times reporter turned environmental historian, has given us a skillful biography of an important novelist, teacher, essayist, and environmental activist. Despite a tough childhood roaming the hardscrabble northern prairies and intermountain West, Stegner earned a Ph.D., taught at Harvard, and established Stanford University's creating writing program just after World War II. That program assembled a long list of fabulously gifted writers, and well before Stegner left it in 1971, he and his students (Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Thomas McGuane, Edward Abbey, Evan Connell, etc.) were thoroughly reimagining the literary West. Fradkin's work complements two earlier biographies by shifting the focus from Stegner's literary achievement to "the whole man ... set against the passing backdrops of his life." The attention to place is fitting, and Fradkin expertly reveals a canny, forthright figure in twentieth-century American letters. Highly recommended.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wallace Stegner and the American West: Superb, September 23, 2008

By	Sandy Greenblat "Stegner Fan" (San Rafael CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

A simply marvelous work. It flows like a novel, contains references that enhance the work and never strays from the subject. Wonderfully executed. A very keen insight to a complex personality. It renewed my interest in reading the books by Stegner I haven't yet read and likewise, makes me want to read more of Philip Fradkin.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars longing to belong, April 14, 2009

By	Daniel B. Clendenin (www.journeywithjesus.net) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Wallace Stegner and the American West (Paperback)

In his autobiographical novel Recapitulation (1979), Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) wrote of his character that "all his earliest years in Salt Lake had been an effort, much of the time as unconscious as growth itself and yet always there as if willed, to outgrow what he was and become what he was not. A stray, he yearned to belong. An outsider and an isolate, he aspired to friends and family and the community solidarity he saw all around him in that Mormon city" (41). In this comprehensive biography of Stegner, published to coincide with the centennial of his birth and written with the full cooperation of Stegner's only child, Page, Philip Fradkin shows just how true that was of his subject.

Stegner's earliest years began in an orphanage in Seattle, the drought-stricken frontier prairie of Saskatchewan homesteaders, a year in Great Falls, Montana (where at age eleven he encountered his first flush toilet and bath tub), and then twelve years in Salt Lake City and the University of Utah: "the happiest years I ever knew or will know." His father was a gambler and a bootlegger who moved the family twenty times in ten years to avoid raids, a man with a violent temper who died in a murder-suicide. Stegner hated his father and inherited that temper. He was plagued by guilt over his mother's hard life, and devoted to Mary, his wife of fifty-nine years.

Later years took Stegner to Harvard and then Stanford, where he founded the creative writing program and nurtured future writers like Wendell Berry and Larry McMurtry. Although he lived in the Stanford area for almost fifty years, he felt alienated from the university by the time he left, and a bitter argument led him to donate his papers to the University of Utah. A man who wrote eloquently about the power of place, he spent considerable time at a home in Vermont, which is where his ashes were spread after he died. Stegner won almost every literary award there is and his books have been translated into numerous languages, yet he was forever cast as a "regional" author and felt spurned by the east coast elites. His novel Angle of Repose won a Pulitzer in 1972 but was later mired in controversial and genuinely complex charges of plagiarism. Outwardly successful, Stegner was inwardly deeply insecure.

As Fradkin points out in his introduction, the previous two biographies of Stegner in 1997 and 1996 were written by professors of literature. He paints with a broader brush and hangs his narrative on the three major components of Stegner's life and work -- Talented Teacher, Reluctant Conservationist, and Prominent Author. Fradkin honors Stegner but does not ignore the many contradictions in his life. Did he ever fit in or "become what he was not?" It's doubtful, Fradkin suggests; the autobiographical character Bruce Mason in Stegner's novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain asks, "But going home where. . . Where do I belong in this?" A bibliography of books by and about Stegner, along with a number of photos, complete the volume.