Word: stegner
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WALLACE STEGNER 464 pages. Doubleday...
Have effete Eastern intellectuals underestimated this whoop-it-up Westerner who often behaved, as his biographer admits, like "the illegitimate offspring of H.L. Mencken and Annie Oakley"? Wallace Stegner, novelist (The Big Rock Candy Mountain), Stanford professor, and a fellow native of Utah, concedes that DeVoto was often wrong as well as "spectacularly right." He was also an 'Implacable showoff" who "set world records for taking himself seriously." But yes, says Stegner, DeVoto has been low-rated, chiefly because he ran with no coterie, and in fact ran head down against most of the opinion makers...
...Stegner may not quite win his case. But in the process of building it he has composed one of the best-written biographies 1974 will see. It consistently goes beyond the limits of its subject to illuminate what it meant to be a writer in the America...
...Like Stegner, DeVoto was a Harvardman who left the West as soon as he decently could. He joined the faculty at Breadloaf Writers' Conference, beginning in 1932. He was briefly editor of the Saturday Review, and for two decades the occupant of the Harper's magazine column called "The Easy Chair." He lectured at Harvard and lived in a gabled house in Cambridge, Mass., that featured an enormous paneled library behind sliding doors. There, in his later years, he and his wife Avis, a student during his young teaching days at Northwestern, entertained the John Kenneth Galbraiths...
...Angle of Repose, Stegner...