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Foreword to the Nevada Edition By STEWART L. UDALL Intimacy and candor are the essence ofany good conversation, and those qualities make the dialogues in this book memorable. Wallace Stegner had a gift for pithy, pungent expression, and one finds nuggets of his thought in these conversations with a friend he esteemed and trusted. The last time I spoke with Wally was in a Santa Fe hospital just before they connected his body to "the damned machinery." I asked him if anyone had ever questioned him on the record about his conversations with Robert Frost in the late 1930s. Both of us were trying to be upbeat, and his negative answer prompted me to inform him that I was going to return with a tape recorder and ask him about his many conversations with "Old Robert." I intended to inquire about the personal affinity that came into play between a young, aspiring writer from the West and the north-of-Boston poet. I knew that both of them had experienced shattering family tragedies around the time they first met, and I had long wondered whether that influenced Frost to invite him to be a companion on their night-walks at Cambridge and Bread Loaf. I had wondered, too, whether their exchanges reflected any ofthe overtones in Frost's unforgettable verse, "I Have Been One Acquainted with the Night." My tardy failure enhances my appreciation of the contents and worth of this book. Richard Etulain, it is plain, developed a warm friendship with Wally Stegner, and an understanding ofhis basic beliefs. This enabled him to ask all the right questions and obtain revealing answers. I suspect that (as in the case ofWally's relationship with Robert Frost) their affinity evolved out of the circumstance that their lives overlapped and both of them were "versed FOREWORD TO THE NEVADA EDITION in country things." Richard Etulain, one must remember, is the son of a Basque herdsman and grew up in the lonely sheep country ofeastern Washington . Etulain conveys the flavor of Stegner's spirit and his self-deprecating wit. He informs us that once when a journalist asked Wally to explain the difference between his and Louis ~Amour's Wests, Stegner wryly offered the response, "A few million dollars."And Ivan Doig has reminded us that once when a pompous interviewer asked Stegner to describe "what Western writers will have to do to produce a crop ofdistinguished novels," Wally's unvarnished reply was, "Write good books." This is a precious work. It tells us what we need to know about the mind and faith of a preeminent humanist of our time, Wallace Earle Stegner. ...

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