After a brief stint at Harvard during World War II, he joined the faculty at Stanford. Three more quickly followed, including the autobiographical "The Big Rock Candy Mountain" in 1943. His first novel, "Remembering Laughter," had been published in 1937. Wallace never forgave his father, who shot himself to death in a Utah flophouse in 1940.īy then, Stegner was a respected professor and writer, a friend of such luminaries as Robert Frost and historian Bernard DeVoto, whom he'd met at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont.
Stegner nursed her through her final illness, after her husband had abandoned her. The greatest blow, however, was the death from cancer of his beloved mother. Then, his 23-year-old brother died of pneumonia after rescuing a motorist trapped in the snow. The small savings he had amassed from working as a clerk in a linoleum shop were wiped out in a bank failure. But a series of disasters threatened his concentration. While on a teaching assistantship at the University of Iowa, he started writing stories and essays. "Writing was not a game it was a challenge to the soundness of your character, a challenge to the clarity and depth of your perception."įollowing his graduation from the University of Utah, Stegner drifted into an academic career. "He was impatient with those who played with literature, who wrote self-indulgently to show off or as `self expression,' " writes Benson. In Stegner's view, it was "unfortunate that a literary reputation in this country is all too often generated out of notoriety, notoriety that comes by gaining a sensational press-by stabbing your wife, getting your picture taken with Hollywood actors, or throwing a tantrum in a New York bistro."Īs a moralist who stood for high ethical standards, Stegner was out of step with the mood of the literary Establishment for much of his career.
paid a penalty for his unwillingness to seek cheap publicity," he writes. Though Benson, who teaches American literature at San Diego State University, writes well and has many insights about Stegner's work, his book is marred by an eagerness to cast his subject as a victim, and its relentlessly defensive tone. Benson, in his new biography of Stegner, blames the Eastern literary-media Establishment (including The New York Times Book Review, which did not review "Angle of Repose" and relegated "Crossing to Safety" to a small review in the back pages). There are many reasons Stegner never achieved literary celebrity-not the least being the uneven quality of his fiction.
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