Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner was an American novelist, historian, biographer, and naturalist who was often called "The Dean of Western Writers."
Born on February 18, 1909, in Lake Mills, Stegner was educated at East High School, the University of Utah, and the University of Iowa. His career spanned multiple disciplines, encompassing fiction, biography, history, and environmental advocacy. As an environmentalist, he was recognized with the Sierra Club John Muir Award, reflecting his sustained engagement with conservation concerns alongside his literary work.
Stegner received a notable range of honors over the course of his life. He was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, and an O. Henry Award. His fiction earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972 and the U.S. National Book Award in 1977, two of the most significant recognitions in American letters. He died on April 13, 1993, in Santa Fe. Writing in English throughout his career, Stegner worked across the roles of novelist, historian, biographer, and naturalist, and his identity as an environmentalist remained a consistent thread running through his professional life alongside his engagement with the American West.
Quotes by Wallace Stegner
Wallace Stegner's insights on:
Westerners live outdoors more than people elsewhere because outdoors is mainly what they’ve got.
Ambition is a path, not a destination, and it is essentially the same path for everybody. No matter what the goal is, the path leads through Pilgrim’s Progress regions of motivation, hard work, persistence, stubbornness, and resilience under disappointment. Unconsidered, merely indulged, ambition becomes a vice; it can turn a man into a machine that knows nothing but how to run. Considered, it can be something else – pathway to the stars, maybe.
Imprisoned in reiterative seasons, vacillating between hope and disappointment, they were kept from being the vigorous doers that their nature and their culture instructed them to be.
There is something about all beards that is like the gesture of thumbing the nose. Thank you very much. Up yours.
You hear what the dean said about Jesus Christ? ‘Sure He’s a good teacher, but what’s He published?
A wandering dog of a night wind came in off the sagebrush mesa carrying a bar of band music, and laid it on her doorstep like a bone.
