Cultural Criticism, circa 1974

The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto. By Wallace Stegner. University of Nebraska Press, 2001

A Country in the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, History, and the American Land. By John L. Thomas. Routledge, 2000

If he were to put a single label on what he had written in the Easy Chair, [DeVoto] would call it "cultural criticism," [insisting] that "no manifestation of American life is trivial to the critic of culture."

Wallace Stegner, The Uneasy Chair

As much as A Country in the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard DeVoto, History, and the American Land, John L. Thomas's account of an "intense intellectual friendship" (9), Wallace Stegner's biography of Bernard DeVoto, The Uneasy Chair, is a book about two men."[W]hen he created DeVoto's life," Stegner's son, Page, has commented, "he created his own" (qtd. in Benson 368). "[U]ntil Ibegan this biography," Stegner writes, "I had not realized how many of my basic attitudes about the West, about America in general, about literature, and about history parallel his, either because somuch of our experience retraced the same curve or because of his direct influence" (Uneasy ix). As Stegner makes the case for DeVoto's importance and originality as a "cultural critic" of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, he demonstrates even more fully his own. Attending particularly to the two men's devotion to conservation, these two books allow readers to conclude that DeVoto and Stegner laid the groundwork for later environmental historians such as Donald Worster, William Cronon, and Dan Flores by focusing on the interrelationships between environmental and social issues and by emphasizing geography as a determining element in understanding just about anything.

In prolific careers as writers in multiple genres, DeVoto and Stegner won awards aplenty, including Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes, and both have had wide audiences. Yet their categorization as regional writers has obscured their achievement as cultural critics and as what we now call public intellectuals. Nearly 10 years after his death, Stegner's fiction has many fans, particularly the densely textured Angle of Repose (1971), which is, like so much of Stegner's work, genre blurring—a "fictional biography" or "cultural history as novel" based on the life and letters of Mary Hallock Foote. Stegner's four biographies—of Clarence Dutton, John Wesley Powell, Joe Hill, and DeVoto—are similarly genre crossing; as much cultural history as biography, their methodology is instructive to contemporary critics. Curt Meine has even called Stegner a "geobiographer" examining "therelationship between biographical subject and biogeographical space" and using "this relationship to examine forces, tensions, patterns, and themes at the heart of North America's cultural development" (123). As his title suggests, Thomas also emphasizes DeVoto's and Stegner's leading roles in the environmental movement of the past 50 years,producing an eminently readable and interesting biography for apopular audience. But Stegner's book, originally published in1974, is more rewarding to the academic reader and shows morefully whythese two men deserve increased scholarly attention today.

The men's lives do "trace the same curve" (Uneasy 3). Both Stegner, born in 1909 in Iowa, and DeVoto, born in 1897 in Utah, lived what Stegner, echoing DeVoto, calls the "Fossil Remnants of aFrontier Childhood," much of it on farms (3). Until landing in Salt Lake City during his teen years, Stegner's family roamed throughout the West, his restless sometimes brutal father seeking "the Big Rock Candy Mountain" while the boy identified with his home-seeking mother. DeVoto stayed put in or near the railroad town of Ogden, his youth shaped by the conflict between his misanthropic, intellectual Catholic father and his protective jack-Mormon mother. In Stegner's reading of his own life, in The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), and DeVoto's, these family conflicts become symptomatic of differences between male and female values, leading both authors to struggle with masculine roles. While Stegner attempted to envision a masculinity based as much upon his mother's "gentleness and resilience" as upon "his...