Wallace Stegner
Wallace Earle Stegner ( born February 18, 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa, † April 13, 1993 in Santa Fe, New Mexico) was an American historian, author, and environmental activist.
Biography
Wallace Stegner was born in a poor family and grew up in Great Falls, Montana, Salt Lake City, Utah, and southern Saskatchewan on what he wrote in his autobiography Wolf Willow. About himself said Stegner, he " lived at twenty locations in eight states and in Canada ." While living in Utah, he joined, even though a member of the Presbyterian church, a scout group of the Mormon church, and won the prestigious Eagle Scout Award, the highest award of the Boy Scouts of America. He studied at the University of Utah and the University of Iowa in 1930 and was awarded a BA degree. In 1935, he received his doctorate from the University of Iowa.
He then taught at the Universities of Utah and Wisconsin, Harvard and since 1945 at Stanford University. At Stanford, he called 1946 the degree program in creative writing to life, which he headed until his retirement in 1971. His students included Sandra Day O'Connor, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Simin Dāneshwar, George V. Higgins, Thomas McGuane, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Gordon Lish, Ernest Gaiens and Larry McMurtry. Stegner worked as an advisor to the Minister of the Interior Stewart Udall U.S. under the Kennedy administration and was from 1964 to 1966 on the board of the Sierra Club, the oldest and largest conservation organization in the U.S.. Finally, he moved to the vicinity of Los Altos Hills, California.
Wallace Stegner died on 13 April 1993 in Santa Fe, New Mexico at the consequences of a car accident.
Work
For his novel Angle of Repose Wallace Stegner won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize and 1977 National Book Award for The Spectator Bird. End of the 80s he refused the National Medal of Arts from the American Academy National Endowment for the Arts (NEA ), as the NEA had become his opinion too political. John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ( 1954), a biography of John Wesley Powell, the head of the expedition to explore the Colorado River and thus also of the Grand Canyon: To his non- fictional work Beyond the Hundredth Meridian heard. Much of his work takes place in and around Greensboro, Vermont, where he lived intermittently. Because of the relentless depiction of some characters (especially in Second Growth ), some residents felt personally attacked, whereupon Stegner Greensboro not visited for several years.
In the U.S. long been a classic of modernity, was the discovery of his work in German-speaking long in coming: in German edition Stegner's last novel was released in 2008 time of security (English title Crossing to Safety) and triggered a broad press coverage from.
Bibliography
Novels
- Remembering Laughter (1937 ) - dt: the laughter of a summer ( Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1951)
- The Potter's House (1938 )
- On a Darkling Plain (1940 ) - dt: No child left alone ( Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1949)
- Fire and Ice (1941 )
- The Big Rock Candy Mountain ( autobiographical ) ( 1943) - German: The mountain of my dreams ( Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1952)
- Second Growth ( 1947)
- The Preacher And the Slave aka Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel ( 1950)
- A Shooting Star (1961 ) - dt: Each star on its orbit ( Bern: Scherz, 1962)
- All the Little Live Things ( 1967) - dt: Days like honey ( Bern: Scherz, 1970); Translation by Chris Shepherd u.d.T. Before the silence of the storm (Munich: dtv, 2011)
- Angle of Repose (1971 ) - Pulitzer Prize
- The Spectator Bird ( 1976) - National Book Award - Germany: The Night of the lapwing (Munich: dtv, 2009)
- Recapitulation (1979 )
- Crossing to Safety (1987 ) - dt: time of security dtv, München 2008 ISBN 978-3-423-24661-3
Anthologies
- The Women On the Wall ( 1950)
- The City of the Living: And Other Stories ( 1957)
- Writer's Art: A Collection of Short Stories (1972 )
- Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner (1990 )
- Late Harvest: Rural American Writing ( 1996) ( with Bobbie Ann Mason)
Non-fiction
- Mormon Country (1942 )
- One Nation (1945 )
- Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ( 1954)
- Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier ( autobiographical ) ( 1955)
- The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (1964 )
- Teaching the Short Story (1966 )
- The Sound of Mountain Water (1969 )
- Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, Export Book, Beirut 1971; Edition: 2007, Selwa Press, ISBN 978-0-9701157-4-4
- Writer in America ( 1982)
- Conversations With Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature ( 1983)
- This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country And Its Magic Rivers (1985 )
- American Places ( 1985)
- On the Teaching of Creative Writing (1988 )
- The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard Devoto (1989 )
- Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, 'Living and writing in the west' ( autobiographical ) ( 1992)
Awards
Also: Three times awarded the O. Henry Award, two-time Guggenheim Fellow, a Senior Fellow of the National Institute of Humanities, member of the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.