At a Tanner Humanities Center and Marriott Library event on October 20, journalist Alex Beam introduced his new biography, Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers (Signature Books). Drawing on the Stegner archive housed in the Marriott Library’s Special Collections, Beam traced the novelist’s complicated life and enduring impact on American letters and environmental thought. 

The biography explores interwoven tensions in Stegner’s life and career: the unresolved conflict with his bootlegger father; his position as both outsider to, and advocate for, Mormon culture; and his role as a conservationist public intellectual who helped save Utah’s Dinosaur National Monument, but mourned the loss of Glen Canyon. At the heart of Stegner’s work, Beam explained, is his belief that the West’s fragile and distinctive natural world demanded careful, restrained settlement. 

Beam also discussed the richness of the Library’s archive, which contains Stegner’s correspondence with pivotal figures in Mormon historiography, including exchanges with Fawn M. Brodie, author of No Man Knows My History, a biography of Joseph Smith. There is also documentation of Stegner’s advocacy for the publication of Juanita Brooks’s The Mountain Meadows Massacre through Stanford University Press after initial rejection by Houghton. The collection of manuscripts includes Stegner’s famous 1960 “Wilderness Letter,” an influential statement prior to the passage of the Wilderness Act four years later, and which has remained an important document in the American conservation movement. 

In the question-and-answer period, Beam discussed the appeal of Stegner as the subject of a brief, accessible biography, in large part because of the Marriott Library’s collection. There was also discussion of the plagiarism scandal surrounding Stegner’s 1971 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Angle of Repose. 

Beam’s research at the Marriott Library revealed the depth of Stegner’s connection to Utah and to the U. This connection is shown by the author’s choice to house his papers not at Stanford, where he founded the creative writing program, but at the University of Utah where he earned his undergraduate degree in English in 1930. According to Beam, “Stegner never tired of thanking the U for granting him a fully rounded life.” 

In his essay, “It is the Love of Books I Owe Them,” Stegner appraises the University of Utah’s role in his intellectual development:

As my tennis-and-basketball-playing friends ushered me into the human world and taught me how to belong, this handful of teacher friends introduced me to the life of the mind where, even though I didn't know it then, I most wanted to live. No university, even the greatest, could have done much more. 

Robert Carson
Associate Director, Tanner Humanities Center

Alex Beam’s other books include American Crucifixion: The Murder of Joseph Smith and the Fate of the Mormon Church); The Feud: Vladimir Nabokov, Edmund Wilson, and the End of a Beautiful Friendship; and Broken Glass: Mies van der Rohe, Edith Farnsworth, and the Fight over a Modernist Masterpiece. He was a longtime columnist for The Boston Globe, and his writing has appeared in numerous other venues including Slate and The Atlantic. 

Photograph of Wallace Stegner by Margaretta K. Mitchell Photography in 1977, Wallace Stegner Photograph Collection, p0561n01_03_01, Marriott Library