As Earth Day 2008 approaches, we’re reminded of those people instrumental in moving this planet towards a healthier course. When picturing well-known advocates we might envision John Muir in Yosemite standing stoically alongside Theodore Roosevelt, or Earth First! co-founder David Foreman raising his clenched fist in the air. We might imagine Henry David Thoreau writing voraciously in his cabin at Walden Pond or picture Ansel Adams’ sublime black and white photographs of the Owens and Yosemite valleys. But, what about Wallace Stegner? ‘Oh,’ you say, ‘the man who wrote ‘Angle of Repose?” Well, yes, that very man.
While Wallace Stegner is indeed best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the adventures of Susan and Oliver Ward in Angle of Repose (based on a real-life story), he played a much larger role, especially in circles passionate about the West. Undeniably, it was this passion for all things land-related that drove Stegner into a variety of roles, seemingly best characterized in three areas.
Foremost, this literary giant is classified as an award-winning author whose writings over a 50 year period gave voice to the American West. Stegner wrote fiction (his favored genre), historical nonfiction, and essays, addressing topics such as the settling of the West, California’s growth, environmental degradation, the Mormons in Utah, marriage, friendships, and one odd contribution that dealt with ‘the search for Arabian oil.’
Second, ‘Wally,’ as he was known to family and friends, is legendary as the teacher who co-created the creative writing program at Stanford, enticing such soon-to-be acclaimed writers to participate: Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, William Kittredge, Jim Houston, Larry McMurtry, Poet Laureate Robert Haas, and Ken Kesey.
Lastly, Stegner was an active conservationist whose eloquent letters influenced the passing of such legislation as the Land and Water Conservation Fund and The Wilderness Act, both ratified in 1964. He sat on the boards of The Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, served as assistant to the Secretary of the Interior, Stewart Udall, during the Kennedy administration, and was enlisted to participate on the National Parks Advisory Board. In the 1950s, Stegner worked alongside David Brower and the Sierra Club and other activists to prevent dam construction in Dinosaur National Monument.
Stegner’s Saskatchewan upbringing began his life-long love affair with the frontier and all things wild, and from that beginning he moved forward to create masterpieces and smaller works of art, depicting the land of aridity. He notes in an essay, ‘Aridity, more than anything, gives the western landscape its character,’ and ‘The Westerner is less a person than a continuing adaptation. The West is less a place than a process.’ One of Stegner’s most famous pieces of activism, although he didn’t realize it at the time, was a letter he wrote in 1960 to a Berkeley forestry student who was working on a portion of the Outdoor Resources Review Commission (ORRC). In it, Stegner argued for wilderness. Twenty years later, Stegner looked back at his urgings in the letter: ‘I find that my opinions have not changed. They have actually been sharpened by an increased urgency. We are 20 years closer to showdown…preservation has not moved as fast as it should have.’ One wonders what the two-fingered typist would write today.
As an author with a lust for fiction, a teacher who influenced an entire generation of readers and writers, and a tireless advocate speaking for the land, this man may be hard to classify, but on Earth Day he most surely shouldn’t be forgotten.
Stegner died at age 84 in 1993 following an auto accident in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Although the last part of his life was lived in the Los Altos hills, his remains were brought to his summer home in Greensboro, Vermont. He is survived by his wife, Mary, who resides in a nursing home, and his son Page and daughter-in-law Lynn (both writers), and granddaughter Allison. If you’d like to learn more about Wallace Stegner, pick up Philip Fradkin’s February 2008 publication, ‘Wallace Stegner and the American West,’ and/or ‘The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner,’ published in 2007, edited by his son Page Stegner.
Some of Wallace Stegner’s most highly regarded books: ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain,’ ‘Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West,’ ‘All the Little Live Things,’ ‘Angle of Repose (1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction),’ ‘The Spectator Bird (1976 National Book Award),’ ‘Crossing to Safety,’ and ‘Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West.’
For a review of Angle of Repose, see Sara Zimmerman’s review in the January 2007 edition of Moonshine Ink.
The Wilderness Letter
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; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Without any remaining wilderness we are committed wholly, without chance for even momentary reflection and rest, to a headlong drive into our technological termite-life, the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment. We need wilderness preserved – as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds – because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.
An excerpt from Wallace Stegner’s ‘The Wilderness Letter,’ written to David E. Pesonen at the Wildland Research Center, Berkeley, December 3, 1960.
