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A compassionate writer for an endangered land

A region built out of rugged individualism, the pioneering spirit of the West inspired many writers to chronicle-and shape-its tortuous path to the present. From Muir to Steinbeck to Hemingway, the people and places of the West were transcribed through their experiences and imagination. But it was the late author and environmental activist Wallace Stegner who, many would argue, best captured the raw, ever-changing identity of the West.

Stegner, who died in 1993 at the age of 84, wrote 29 novels and countless essays reflecting his reverence of the West. But his prose wasn't dotted with gun-toting cowboys nor their accompanying mythology. Rather, Stegner wrote what one critic described as "thoughtful, poetic, leisurely prose about living in the hardscrabble American West."

Stegner spent the last 50 years of his life in California, the first 25 at Stanford University, where he fathered the college's first creative writing program. By the time he retired in 1971, the program was a well-respected institution: his writing fellowships having drawn such luminaries as Ken Kesey, Willa Cather and Larry McMurtry.

But Stegner's lifework wasn't simply academic. His concern over the reckless development of the West led to environmental activism early in his life. The theme of conservancy and stewardship in the face of the frontier mentality was a common thread throughout his novels and essays, and it was his eloquence of prose that made him a successful activist.

In a letter to President John F. Kennedy, Stegner appealed for support of the nation's first wilderness bills. "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed," he said.

As a pioneer environmentalist, he noted half a century ago that people were headed for disaster by presuming that the West's aridity-its "little rain and big consequences"-would be overcome by human engineering. Stegner urged foresight, noting the cavalier use of the region's scarce water to maintain an idealized environment.

"You have to get over the color green," Stegner wrote. "You have to quit associating beauty with gardens or lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

Stegner worked with the Sierra Club and other conservation groups to save the wild places of the West threatened by urban development and subsequent demand for water. In the 1950s he was involved in the much publicized and successful battle opposing dams in Dinosaur National Monument and the
Grand Canyon. He referred to these majestic and intimidating wild areas of the West as our "geography of hope."

But Stegner's success can best be measured through his work. He won the Pulitzer Prize for his book, "Angle of Repose," the National Book Award for "The Spectator Bird," and the Commonwealth Gold Medal for "All the Little Live Things." His short stories have been recognized with numerous awards, and the Los Angeles Times honored him with the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime literary achievement.

In April, the Library Foundation of San Francisco will honor his achievements with the opening of the Wallace Stegner Environmental Center in the city's new main library.

Stegner, who spent his childhood in Canada, his youth in Utah and adulthood in California, followed a simple formula: He wrote about the people he knew in the places he knew them.

"If art is a byproduct of living, and I believe it is, then I want my own efforts to stay as close to earth and human experience as possible," he wrote, "...and the only earth I know is the one I have lived on, the only human experience I am at all sure of is my own."

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