Novelist and teacher Wallace Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa (1909). His father was a schemer who was constantly moving the family from place to place, hoping to strike it rich in one of the Western boomtowns. He watched as his father tried and failed to plant a farm in North Dakota, tried and failed to run a lunchroom in the backwoods of Washington state, sold bootleg liquor in Great Falls, Montana, poured the family's savings into an invention that was supposed to detect gold in the ground, and finally bought a piece of redwood forest in California, only to cut it all down and sell it for firewood. By the time Stegner was 20, he had lived in more than 20 different houses, including, at one point, a derailed dining car. But though he had a tough childhood, Stegner grew to love the great open wilderness of the American West.
Stegner managed to get into the University of Utah by the time he was 16, and he went on to get a Ph.D. in English literature. But while he was working on his dissertation, his brother died of a sudden attack of pneumonia. Then, his mother was killed by cancer. And finally, his father committed suicide. By the end of the 1930s, Stegner had lost his entire immediate family.
He'd already begun writing fiction, but he wanted to write a new kind of novel about the American West. At that time, the only novels being published about the West were full of cowboys and heroic pioneers. Stegner said, "I wanted to write about what happens to the pioneer virtues and the pioneer type of family when the frontiers are gone and the opportunities all used up. "The result was his first big success, his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), loosely based on the experiences of his own family. It tells the story of a man named Bo Mason and his wife, Elsa, who travel over the American West, trying to make it rich.
Stegner went on to write dozens of novels about the West, including Angle of Repose (1971) and The Spectator Bird (1976). But he also started one of the most influential creative writing programs in the country, at Stanford University, where his students included Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Raymond Carver, and Scott Turow.
*Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.
*A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.
*Hard writing makes easy reading.
*She saw objectives, not obstacles.
*It is something-it can be everything-to have found a fellow bird with whom you can sit among the rafters while the drinking and boasting and reciting and fighting go on below.”
*One means of sanity is to retain a hold on the natural world, ... Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples.
*have a chance to create a society to match its scenery.
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