Journal 4:  Memoir:  Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner published over 50 works in fiction and nonfiction (the link will take you to amazon.com--search for Stegner to see a list of works) and won two Pulitzer prizes. For many years he was a professor of literature and director of creative writing at Stanford University. Stegner was also an environmental activist: see the memorial tributes to him from High Country News, The Wilderness Society, and the Ecology Hall of Fame. Today his writings are cited to justify water conservation, living with a sense of place (he wrote an essay called, "The Sense of Place"), and the policies of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Two research centers, in San Francisco and Utah, honor him as an environmentalist, but literary critics note that his books express regional and cultural themes about late 20th century life. Recommended reading: his novels Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety; a biography of John Wesley Powell, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian; and his collections of essays, The Sound of Mountain Water and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs.

You're on your own for Journal #4.  Check out the links, but repond in some way to Stegner's intense personal attachment to place in the early going of Wolf Willow.   Pick out a particular favorite passage and analyze it.  What questions do you have for the rest of us?

<rvannoy@runet.edu>