It’s the birthday of Wallace Stegner (1909-1993), known as the “dean of Western writers.” While Stegner was realistic about the shortcomings and sins of the West, his writing reflected the promise and optimism of the Western frontier because he believed that the West was “the New World’s last chance to be something better, the only American society still malleable enough to be formed.”

Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa, but his father dreamed of getting rich quick and moved the family all over. When he was 11, the family left Saskatchewan for Great Falls, Montana, where Stegner finally had access to a library. He skipped the seventh and tenth grades and graduated from high school at 16, the same year as his older brother Cecil. (Cecil died at 23 of pneumonia.) Stegner studied English at the University of Utah and went to graduate school at the University of Iowa, finishing his Ph.D. in American literature in 1935. While in grad school, he married Mary, a fellow student, to whom he was married for the rest of his life.

Stegner was teaching at the University of Utah when he wrote his first novel, Remembering Laughter (1937), which won first prize and $2,500 in a competition by Little, Brown. (This was back when $2,500 was like a million dollars. Or maybe $25,000. Probably somewhere in between.) Stegner quit his teaching position and biked around England and France with his wife before he started teaching again, this time at the University of Wisconsin and then Harvard. Stegner published several more books (On a Darkling Plain, 1940; Fire and Ice, 1941; the nonfiction Mormon Country, 1942) before publishing his semi-autobiographical novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), which he only felt he could publish because his father had died in 1940. (His father committed suicide after killing a woman. His mother, to whom he was much closer, had died at 50 when Stegner was 24.) The novel was a huge critical and popular success.

In 1945, Stegner began teaching at Stanford University and established a creative writing program that wound up producing writers like Wendell Berry and Larry McMurtry. His first crop of students were GI students who he said were “the best students, and the most motivated, that any professor ever had.” After Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel came out in 1950, Stegner was discouraged about how his novels were received and didn’t publish another novel until A Shooting Star (1961), which he ultimately said was too much like a soap opera. Then came All the Little Live Things (1967), the Pulitzer-winning Angle of Repose (1971), the National Book Award-winning Spectator Bird (1976), and more. His final novel was Crossing to Safety (1987). He wrote many important nonfiction works as well, including One Nation (1945), about racial prejudice in the U.S.

Stegner died at 84 several weeks after being injured in a car accident. He was survived by his wife and his son Page Stegner, also a novelist.

Fun fact: Stegner’s friends said “he looked like God ought to look.” Discuss. (But don’t yell at me; I didn’t say it.) https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2314/wallace-stegner-the-art-of-fiction-no-118-wallace-stegner

Have a splendid Presidents’ Day and stay scrupulously honest to the data.