Stegner, Wallace

Stegner, Wallace (Wallace Earle Stegner), 1909–93, American writer, b. Lake Mills, Iowa, grad. Univ. of Utah (1930). He wrote perceptively of the American West in short stories, e.g., The Woman on the Wall (1950); novellas, e.g., On a Darkling Plain (1940); and novels, e.g., The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), Angle of Repose (1971; Pulitzer Prize), and Crossing to Safety (1987); most detailing marriages and the nature of monogamy. He also wrote biographies, memoirs, histories, and essays, and was a pioneering conservationist and an influential teacher of writing at Harvard and Stanford.

See P. Stegner, ed., The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner (2008); biographies by J. J. Benson (1997) and P. L. Fradkin (2008); studies by M. and L. Lewis (1972), A. Arthur, ed. (1982), C. Meine, ed. (1997), J. J. Benson (1998 and 2001), and P. L. Franklin (2008).

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