Measuring the Achievement of Wallace Stegner

In an essay on Honoré de Balzac, Henry James employs a spatial metaphor to suggest the difficulty of assessing a writer of Balzac’s stature. “The way to judge him,” James says, “is to try to walk all round him—on which we see how remarkably far we have to go.” This circumambulatory approach to criticism might apply equally well to Wallace Stegner, whose oeuvre of 13 novels, 15 books of nonfiction, 242 articles, and 57 short stories falls well short of Balzac’s 90 volumes, but whose overall contribution to American life and letters—as fiction writer, biographer, historian, teacher, editor, and environmental advocate—has never been fully assessed.

In the second book-length biography to appear since Stegner’s death in 1993, Philip Fradkin makes a concerted and engaging attempt to walk all round the author’s many-sided career. A self-described environmental journalist whose previous books are focused on the natural history and ecology of the American West, Fradkin does literally walk around several of Stegner’s former haunts and reprises at least two of his important western journeys. Following the trail that was first blazed by Jackson Benson in Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work (1996), Fradkin divides his narrative into four parts: “Unformed Youth,” “Talented Teacher,” “Reluctant Conservationist,” and “Prominent Author.” This topical structure requires a certain amount of overlap and backtracking, but enables Fradkin to stake out the ground any full assessment of Wallace Stegner needs to cover. It also leads to fresh insights into Stegner’s character and relationships, and reveals the conflicts and internal dynamics of a career often fragmented and frustrated by competing interests. Fradkin’s purpose is to see “the whole man—or as close as I can get to him—set against the passing backdrops of his life.” By focusing on the “physical landscapes he inhabited and how they influenced him,” Fradkin hopes to tell “the story of a quintessential westerner who eventually could not deal with the wrenching changes that are a constant of the American West.”

Though Fradkin strives for a journalist’s objectivity, it’s clear that he shares many of his subject’s concerns. Wallace Stegner was not the first to warn of the devastation caused to the West by its rapid and reckless development, but his literary skill made him one of the most vocal and persuasive of the prophets. Fradkin’s approach is especially effective in showing how Stegner’s feeling for the western landscape was formed during his frontier childhood and adventurous youth, how it found its intellectual footing and voice at the universities of Utah and Iowa, and how the author came to play a prominent role in the environmental movement. Much of the environmental legislation of the past fifty years was inspired and guided by the work of such crusaders as Stegner and his allies in the Sierra Club.

Fradkin’s book also adds to our understanding of Stegner’s importance through its examination of his teaching career, especially the years spent at Stanford University, where he founded one of the earliest—and perhaps the most successful—of this country’s creative-writing programs. Though Iowa’s program came first and was always larger, Stegner’s record of grooming and launching important young writers made Stanford’s program equally famous. Fradkin uses interviews and correspondence with some of Stegner’s more illustrious students—among them Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ernest Gaines, Peter Beagle, Robert Stone, Nancy Packer, and Scott Turow—to document the value they placed on their Stanford experience. He also includes testimony from many lesser-known writers who glowingly report the importance of Stegner’s tutelage in their lives and careers.

A common theme to emerge from Fradkin’s survey is the free exchange of ideas and opinions that occurred in the Stanford workshops. Assured by their fellowship program of a nucleus of talented students, Stegner and his colleague Richard Scowcroft did not preach the doctrines of any critical school but remained open to a variety of styles...