Wallace Stegner

Wallace Earle Stegner was born on February 18, 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa, the second son of George Stegner, a restless small-time gambler and bootlegger, and Hilda Paulson. The family moved through North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, and Utah while he was a child, an unsettled upbringing he later mined for his fiction. He spent formative summers on a homestead near Eastend, Saskatchewan, between 1914 and 1920.

He earned a B.A. from the University of Utah in 1930 and an M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa, completing his doctorate in 1935 with a dissertation on the Utah-born naturalist Clarence Dutton. He taught at Augustana College, the University of Utah, the University of Wisconsin, and Harvard before joining Stanford University in 1945, where he founded and ran the Stanford Creative Writing Program for twenty-six years and trained Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Tillie Olsen, and Sandra Day O'Connor's husband John.

His 1943 family novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain, drawn directly from his own childhood, established him as a serious chronicler of the American West. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954) was a biography of the explorer-geologist John Wesley Powell that argued for ecologically realistic limits on western settlement and helped shape modern federal land policy. He served as assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in 1961 and as a member of the National Parks Advisory Board.

His novel Angle of Repose won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and The Spectator Bird won the 1977 National Book Award. He published thirteen novels, three story collections, and ten works of nonfiction in all. He died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 13, 1993, of injuries sustained in a car accident weeks earlier.

The name Wallace comes from the Anglo-Norman French waleis, meaning "foreigner" or specifically "Welshman," and entered Scotland as a surname for people of Brittonic Welsh ancestry. He carried it as a masculine given name passed from surname into first-name use, made famous by the medieval Scottish leader William Wallace.