Stegner’s wild West: Wallace Stegner
—reviewed by Martin Rubin; Sunday, February 24, 2008 (SF Chronicle)
Wallace Stegner and the American West
By Philip L. Fradkin
Knopf; 369 pages; $27.50
“Author of many books on the American West, western editor of Audubon magazine and a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Philip L. Fradkin has a resume that seems to suit him perfectly to write the life of that most Western of literary figures, Wallace Stegner. And after reading ‘Wallace Stegner and the American West,’ it is clear that this is an ideal match between biographer and subject.
“As Fradkin writes in his introduction to the book, ‘I am … intrigued by the whole man – or as close as I can get to him – set against the passing backdrops of his life. This is a book about a man and the physical landscapes he inhabited and how they influenced him. Within that framework it is also the story of a quintessential westerner who eventually could not deal with the wrenching changes that are a constant of the American West.’ . . .
“Because his life spanned much of the 20th century, Stegner had the difficult task of establishing Western literature against a series of dominant critical schools that looked elsewhere. The New York intellectuals, Southern agrarians and New Critics were prominent within the academy and in the broader culture, but Stegner went his own way in both spheres, establishing his influential writing program at Stanford and creating his incomparable novels and landmark nonfiction, evocations and explications of the ethos of the American West.”
For the full review, click here or visit www.sfgate.com.