| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780803292840 | | Publisher: University of Nebraska Press | | Publish Date: 4/10/2007 | | Buy.com Sku: 30705338 | | Item#: RPV2WV | | Dimensions (in Inches) 8.75H x 6L x 1T | | Pages: 512 |
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| | | | "He was precocious, alert, intelligent, brash, challenging, irreverent, literary, self-conscious, insecure, often ostentatiously crude, sometimes insufferable", Wallace Stegner says of Bernard DeVoto, who, in the words of a childhood acquaintance, was also "the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw". Between the disagreeable boy and the literary lion, a life unfolds, full of comedy and drama, as told in this definitive biography, which brings together two exemplary American men of letters. Born within a dozen years of one another in small towns in Utah, both men were, as Stegner writes, "novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us". From this unique vantage point, Stegner follows DeVoto's path from his beloved but not particularly congenial Utah to the even less congenial Harvard where, galvanized by the disregard of the aesthetes around him, he commenced a career that, over three and a half decades, would embrace nearly every sort of literary enterprise: from modestly successful novels to prize-winning Western histories, from the editorship of the Saturday Review to a famously combative, long-running monthly column in Harper's, "The Easy Chair". A nuanced portrait of a stormy literary life, Stegner's biography of DeVoto is also a window on the tumultuous world of American letters in the twentieth century.
Annotation:
Wallace Stegner writes a biography of his fellow Western writer, Pulitzer Prize-winner Bernard de Voto. Among his other achievements, De Voto was a celebrated Mark Twain scholar and for many years wrote the influential "Easy Chair" column in Harper's magazine.
| Author Bio| Wallace Earle Stegner | | Stegner's father, a wanderer and a dreamer--and eventually a suicide--was unable to settle down. His family moved often when Wallace was a child, living in Iowa, North Dakota, Washington state, Montana, Salt Lake City, and a tiny Saskatchewan town Stegner used frequently in his fiction. He entered the University of Utah at 16, where he was encouraged to write, and he did graduate work at Iowa. He was married in 1934--a union that lasted all his life--and had one child, a son. Stegner taught at various universities, including directing the prestigious writing program at Stanford. He was also an active environmentalist. When he was awarded the National Medal for the Arts from the NEA in 1992, he declined, in protest against the Bush administration. Stegner was an unrelenting realist who concentrated on the Western landscape, and the perennial theme in his novels was the quest for identity and permanence in an America that is both fragmented and rootless. When he died at 83 from injuries sustained in an auto accident, the outpouring of grief was a measure of the reverence in which he was held; Edward Abbey declared him to be``the only living American worthy of the Nobel.'' |
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