Wallace Stegner
(1909-1993)
Wallace Stegner bore the imprint of the Saskatchewan prairies all his life. Although he spent just six years (1914-21) in the province, his formative experiences in and around the town of Eastend supplied the themes central to his writing. "If I am native to anything," comments Stegner on a return trip to Eastend in the 1950s, "I am native to this."
Considered one of America's most important writers, Stegner's childhood experiences in Saskatchewan appear prominently in his novels, such as Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), and non-fiction, especially the classic Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (1962).
Wolf Willow is widely considered one of the most influential books on Saskatchewan's history and prairie environment. To Stegner, his experience of the West is embodied in the fragrance of the blooming wolf willow. In the book, Stegner demolishes the superficial view of the prairie as dull and characterless. "It is a long way from characterless; 'overpowering' would be a better word. For over the segmented circle of earth is domed the biggest sky anywhere, which …sheds down on range and wheat and summer fallow a light to set a painter wild… The drama of this landscape is in the sky, pouring with light and always moving."
In 1945, Stegner assumed the directorship of the writing program at Stanford University in California, a position he held until 1971 (the year his Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize.) Stegner's legacy is remembered in the work of prominent writers who trained with him at Stanford, a list that includes Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry, N. Scott Momaday, and Poet Laureate of the United States, Robert Haas.
Stegner became involved with the conservation movement in the 1950s. In 1960, he wrote his famous Wilderness Letter on the importance of federal protection of wild places. This letter helped establish the U.S. National Wilderness Preservation System. He also served as assistant to the Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy administration, working on issues dealing with the expansion of National Parks. In the Wilderness Letter, Stegner writes:
"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 clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence… 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 animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it."
In 1990, the Stegner family home was restored by the Eastend Arts Council and established as a Residence for Artists.
For further information visit the Stegner House website.