What, according to Wallace Stegner, are the characteristics of the “true West”?

Discuss Stegner’s evocation of western landscape in Angle of Repose.

In which of Stegner’s short stories do problems of personal identity figure prominently?

What is unusual about the point of view in The Big Rock Candy Mountain? What do the shifts in point of view accomplish?

Stegner taught creative writing to Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, and Raymond Carver, among others. Do these writers share literary qualities that might be attributed to Stegner’s influence?

Primarily a novelist and historian, Wallace Stegner is the author of many novels, from Remembering Laughter (1937) to The Spectator Bird (1976); his best-known and perhaps his best novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, was published in 1943, and Angle of Repose (1971) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Mormon Country, his first book of nonfiction, was published in 1942; it was followed by approximately a dozen others, including Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954), The Sound of Mountain Water (essays, 1969), and The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974). In addition, he edited many books, including Great American Short Stories (with Mary Stegner, 1957), numerous annual volumes of Stanford Short Stories (with Richard Scowcroft), and The Letters of Bernard DeVoto (1975).

In 1987, Stegner published the novel Crossing to Safety, which he said is “a sort of memoir for Mary [his wife] and myself.” A gentle and affectionate portrait of two very different academic couples, Crossing to Safety met with great critical and popular acclaim. In an offshoot to his long teaching career, Stegner published On the Teaching of Creative Writing: Responses to a Series of Questions in 1988.

Wallace Stegner’s talent lay in his evocation of the West, which otherwise has been poorly documented in so-called Westerns, whether they be films or novels. As writer Richard Etulain has noted, what gives Stegner’s work “its essential character is a deep familiarity with American historical, cultural, and political terrain.” Stegner’s work reveals the many aspects that make up American culture, or Americana. In addition, it provides a basis for understanding modern life in the United States. His literary efforts in this pursuit to portray fast-disappearing cultural and geographic sections of the United States were recognized with the Western History Association Prize in 1990.

Stegner received many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rockefeller Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize, a National Endowment for the Humanities Senior Fellowship, and an American Academy in Rome fellowship. In the spring of 1990, Stegner was given a lifetime achievement award by PEN USA Center West. In September of the same year, he was awarded a senior fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Wallace Stegner also published three collections of short fiction, The Women on the Wall (1950), The City of the Living, and Other Stories (1956), and Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner (1990); two biographies, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954) and The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard De Voto (1974); two collections of critical essays, The Writer in America (1951) and On Teaching and Writing Fiction (2002); a historical monograph, The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (1964); and three volumes of personal essays on the Western experience, Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier(1962), The Sound of Mountain Water (1969), and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Stegner also published a number of edited works, both nonfiction and fiction.

Wallace Stegner would have three distinct audiences after the start of his career:...