Western Book Roundup

Wallace Stegner’s Family Objects to Altered Book

By Jenny Shank, 12-12-07

The heirs of Wallace Stegner are upset that Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, an altered version of a book the late author wrote, was recently published by Selwa Press.  Lisa Leff wrote for the AP: “The owner of Selwa Press, Timothy Barger, is the son of the former president of a U.S. company [ARAMCO] that hired Stegner in 1956 to pen a promotional piece about its history.  Stegner, who is known as the literary laureate of the American West, was treated to two weeks in Saudi Arabia and paid about $16,000 for his effort.”

According to Page Stegner, Wallace’s son, the press omitted passages that “portrayed ARAMCO critically or would have caused problems between the company and Saudi Arabia’s leaders.” Page Stegner and Carl Brandt, Wallace’s literary agent, have asked Selwa to pull the book from shelves or put a disclaimer in every copy, a request that the publisher has not yet complied with.

Dwight Garner at the New York Times Book Review Papercuts blog recently interviewed Denver native Ted Conover, the nonfiction writer who won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001 for his book New Jack: Guarding Sing Sing.  Conover reports that he’s working on a book about roads: “There are five roads, in five different countries, and I traveled each one in the company of someone to whom the road means something special.”

The Lit Blog Co-op, whose motto is “Uniting the leading literary weblogs for the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace,” has chosen University of Montana MFA Matthew Eck’s “The Farther Shore” for its Winter 2007 Read This! selection.  The book will be discussed on various literary blogs this week.  Eck was also recently featured on NewWest.Net/Books in this profile by Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel.

Denver Post Books columnist and novelist David Milofsky included Colorado-raised, Missoula-based Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals in his recent list of favorite books of the year.  “Full disclosure,” he writes, “Kyle was once my student at Colorado State University, but that was long before she was at work on this book.”

Have some regional literary news or events to share?  If so,

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Regarding Stegner's Discovery!, I am the publisher and can categorically refute Page Stegner's claim that Selwa Press, "omitted passages that “portrayed ARAMCO critically or would have caused problems between the company and Saudi Arabia’s leaders.”

This version that I published contains exactly every word Stegner used in the original paperback edition of Discovery! The edition that he personally revised and approved for release under his own name in 1971. I've added proper front matter, back matter and rare photographs of the era to give the work the respect it deserves.

I have every right to proudly publish Discovery! as I guess Page and Brandt have every right to smear Stegner's work by implying that he didn't personally approve a work that he released under his own name. Who are they to dispute the author's decisions?

Unfortunately, this dust up clouds the crystaline beauty of Stegner's words within:

"Suddenly the solid earth veered before their eyes, the intense light flawed and changed, and unknown Arabia - grinned at them - a sudden distorted grin - as the ring of the horizon boiled and floated with mirages."

Until now Discovery! has been all but forgotten for 35 years and never available to the American public, so I'm pleased to present the dynamic prose words of a great author on a subject that virtually no one has ever considered. A story that begins 75 years ago on the other side of the earth in a distant kingdom.

Thanks for offering your perspective, Mr. Barger. A reader also emailed in a link to this NPR story by John McChesney on the matter, which aired yesterday, and includes interviews with people on both sides of this disagreement:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17188267&sc=emaf

Jenny, thanks for the link to the NPR audio. I am Tim's brother and grew up as a child with many of the men who figure in Stegner's book. The story is remarkable on its own and important to understanding the beginnings of the social and economic development of Saudi Arabia. In face of the current impossibility of bringing Stegner's unedited manuscript to the public, it is invaluable to have the Selwa Press edition. American liberal democratic ideas and ideals came to the Middle East largely through two great enterprises - the American University of Beirut and Aramco. Understanding them is necessary to understand our involvement and the impact we have had. It would have been a great loss to have denied the reading public Stegner's account of Aramco's discovery of oil. The story was worthy of the man, and the man was worthy of the story.

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