Appreciating Wallace Stegner 

A few years ago, ok, many years ago, I attended a lecture by a San José State English professor on the subject of Wallace Stegner. I had heard of Stegner and vaguely knew he taught classes in creative writing at Stanford, but I had never read him. When the professor said Stegner was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century and was slighted by literary critics only because he was a West Coast author, my reaction was–Really? 

Then my landlord gave me a Books on Tape copy of Angle of Repose, published in 1972, the year it also won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I’ll agree that books you listen to may be more memorable than books you read, but I can still picture scenes from that book as though I was a bystander observing them in real time.  

The angle of repose is when a mountain reaches the point where rocks no longer tumble down the sides. If you dump a load of gravel and the pile settles and becomes inert, that pile of gravel has reached its “angle of repose.”  Read the book to see why the title fits.) 

One reason that Stegner’s books may be overlooked is because of their length. They are definitely door-stoppers. Angle of Repose is about 600 pages, depending on the edition. My copy of The Big Rock Candy Mountain, written near the end of the Depression and somewhat autobiographical, weighs in at 639 pages. If you want to start small, try All the Little Live Things, published in 1967 and set on the San Mateo Peninsula. It’s under 400 pages. 

Stegner was a major environmentalist, serving on the Sierra Club’s board of directors. His book This is Dinosaur was published by the Sierra Club to fight proposed dams in the Dinosaur National Monument. I’ve visited that Monument; it is not underwater, thank goodness. 

I’ve also hiked on Peninsula trails. Stegner was one of the founding members of the Committee for Green Foothills, a major force in preserving the natural beauty of the Bay Area, including portions of Santa Clara and San Benito counties. What a mensch.


Perhaps Stegner’s most lasting contribution to American literature is the students he taught at his Stanford University’s creative writing program. I will only list the authors I know and like, including Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, George V. Higgins, Thomas McGuane, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Gordon Lish, and Larry McMurtry.  

Sandra Day O’Connor was also a student, but I’m not including her. I don’t think her Supreme Court opinions are in the same class with the others. O’Connor aside, that is a an absolutely amazing list, an unbelievable list. How I wish I could have been a student in that class.   

~ Roy Christman