Wallace Stegner and the American West
Stegner, born in Iowa in 1909 and brought up on a Saskatchewan dirt farm, may have been our last frontier writer. As Fradkin notes in this astute biography, it was a miracle that he didn’t write pulp Westerns. Instead, Stegner took as his subject the failure of his father’s homestead, built on denial of the most fundamental Western reality: drought. Stegner’s fiction stalked the slow disintegration of the family as closely as previous potboilers tracked cattle; and he transformed his father’s subsequent rambles—bootlegging the family from the dry northern plains to drier Mormon counties—into a founding narrative stronger than any ultra-violent "revisionist" Western. Whether as novelist, conservationist, or teacher, Stegner showed how the West has "a way of warping well-carpentered habits, and raising the grain on exposed dreams."Copyright © 2008Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker