Wallace Stegner

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Wallace Earle Stegner (born February 18, 1909 in Lake Mills , Iowa , † April 13, 1993 in Santa Fe , New Mexico ) was an American historian , writer and environmental activist .

biography

Wallace Stegner was born into a poor family and grew up in Great Falls , Montana , Salt Lake City , Utah , and southern Saskatchewan , which he wrote about in his autobiography Wolf Willow . About himself, Stegner said he "lived in twenty locations in eight states and in Canada." While he lived in Utah, he joined, though himself a member of the Presbyterian Church , a scout group of Mormon 's Church and won the prestigious Eagle Scout Award, the highest award of the Boy Scouts of America . He studied at the University of Utah and the University of Iowa and received a BA degree in 1930. In 1935 he received his PhD from the University of Iowa.

He then taught at the Universities of Utah and Wisconsin, Harvard and, since 1945, at Stanford University . In 1946 he initiated the creative writing course in Stanford , which he headed until his retirement in 1971. His students included Sandra Day O'Connor , Edward Abbey , Wendell Berry , Simin Dāneschwar , George V. Higgins , Thomas McGuane, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey , Gordon Lish, Ernest Gaines, and Larry McMurtry . Stegner worked as an advisor to the US Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall under the Kennedy administration and was on the board of directors of the Sierra Club , the oldest and largest conservation organization in the USA , from 1964 to 1966 . Eventually he moved to the Los Altos Hills , California area .

Wallace Stegner died on April 13, 1993 in Santa Fe, New Mexico as a result of a car accident.

plant

Wallace Stegner received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his novel Angle of Repose and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird in 1977 . In the late 1980s, he turned down the National Medal of Arts from the US Academy National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) because, in his opinion, the NEA had become too political. His non-fictional work includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954), a biography of John Wesley Powell , the leader of the expedition to explore the Colorado River and thus the Grand Canyon .

Much of his work takes place in and around Greensboro , Vermont , where he temporarily lived. Because of the relentless portrayal of some characters (especially in Second Growth ), some residents felt personally attacked, whereupon Stegner stopped visiting Greensboro for several years.

Although the first German translations of Stegner's works appeared as early as 1949, he remained largely unknown in German-speaking countries. The German first edition of Stegner's last novel Zeit der Geborgenheit (English title Crossing to Safety ) received attention in 2008 .

bibliography

Novels

  • Remembering Laughter (1937) - German: The Laughter of a Summer (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1951)
  • The Potter's House (1938)
  • On a Darkling Plain (1940) - German: Nobody stays alone (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1949)
  • Fire and Ice (1941)
  • The Big Rock Candy Mountain (autobiographical) (1943) - German: The mountain of my dreams (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1952)
  • Second Growth (1947)
  • The Preacher And the Slave aka Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel (1950)
  • A Shooting Star (1961) - German: Every star on its path (Bern: Scherz, 1962)
  • All the Little Live Things (1967) - German: days like honey (Bern: Scherz, 1970); New translation by Chris Hirte udT Vor der Stille der Sturm (Munich: dtv, 2011)
  • Angle of Repose (1971) - Pulitzer Prize
  • The Spectator Bird (1976) - National Book Award - German: Die Nacht des Kiebitz (Munich: dtv, 2009)
  • Recapitulation (1979)
  • Crossing to Safety (1987) - German: Zeit der Geborgenheit dtv, Munich 2008 ISBN 978-3-423-24661-3

Anthologies

  • The Women On the Wall (1950)
  • The City of the Living: And Other Stories (1957)
  • Writer's Art: A Collection of Short Stories (1972)
  • Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner (1990)
  • Late Harvest: Rural American Writing (1996) (with Bobbie Ann Mason)

Non-fiction

  • Mormon Country (1942)
  • One Nation (1945)
  • Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954)
  • Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier (autobiographical) (1955)
  • The Gathering of Zion: The Story of the Mormon Trail (1964)
  • Teaching the Short Story (1966)
  • The Sound of Mountain Water (1969)
  • Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil , Export Book, Beirut 1971; New edition: 2007, Selwa Press, ISBN 978-0-9701157-4-4
  • Writer in America (1982)
  • Conversations With Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature (1983)
  • This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country And Its Magic Rivers (1985)
  • American Places (1985)
  • On the Teaching of Creative Writing (1988)
  • The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard Devoto (1989)
  • Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs, 'Living and writing in the west' (autobiographical) (1992)

Awards

  • 1937 Little, Brown Prize for Remembering Laughter
  • 1965 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
  • 1967 Commonwealth Gold Medal for All the Little Live Things
  • 1969 member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
  • 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angle of Repose
  • 1977 National Book Award for The Spectator Bird
  • 1980 Los Angeles Times Kirsch award for life's work
  • 1990 PEN Center USA West award for complete works
  • 1991 California Arts Council award his complete works
  • 1992 National Endowment for the Arts (not accepted)

Also: three times the O. Henry Award, two-time Guggenheim fellow, Senior Fellow of the National Institute of Humanities, member of the National Institute and Academy of Arts and Letters, member of the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Books about Wallace Stegner

  • 1982 Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner, edited by Anthony Arthur, GK Hall & Co.
  • 1983 Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature, Wallace Stegner and Richard Etulain, University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City
  • 1984 Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work by Jackson J. Benson
  • 2008 Wallace Stegner and the American West by Philip L. Fradkin

Web links

dtv (numerous German-language press reviews)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Stegner, Wallace, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs" Random House, 1992, back cover.
  2. ^ Wallace Stegner Facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Wallace Stegner
  3. ↑ William H. Honan: “Wallace Stegner Is Dead At 84; Pulitzer Prize Winning Author. ” , New York Times, April 15, 1993, sec. B, p. 8.
  4. ↑ Reviews of the time of security . Pearl Divers , accessed May 11, 2018
  5. ^ Members: Wallace Stegner. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 27, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Stegner, Wallace
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stegner, Wallace Earle (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American historian, writer, and environmental activist
DATE OF BIRTH February 18, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Lake Mills , Iowa
DATE OF DEATH April 13, 1993
Place of death Santa Fe , New Mexico