It’s Wallace Stegner’s West, We Just Live In It

By Jenny Shank, 2-17-10

Wallace Stegner, as probably most of the people reading this know, was a novelist, nonfiction writer, and environmentalist who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for Angle of Repose.  His place in the literature of the American West is so secure that he’s often called “The Dean of Western Writers.” Stegner grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, Great Falls, Montana, and Saskatchewan.  He taught writing at several universities and founded the creative writing program at Stanford. 

In a New York Times column last year, Timothy Egan called Stegner an “uber-citizen of the West” and wrote, “All over the West, Stegner centers, Stegner prizes and Stegner scholars produce work that follows his life theme: an attempt to get Westerners to make peace with their surroundings.”

Last year the University of Utah celebrated the 100th anniversary of Wallace Stegner’s birth with a series of events culminating in a spring symposium.  But Westerners aren’t done celebrating Stegner yet, as several Stegner-related events are scheduled across the region over the next few weeks:

• Next week Rocky Mountain PBS will host two screenings of the documentary “Wallace Stegner,” one in Denver on Wednesday, February 24 at the Starz FilmCenter (6 p.m. reception, 7 p.m. screening), and one at the Durango Public Library on the same day (5:30-7:30 p.m.).  Both screenings will be followed by a panel discussion “about Stegner’s impact on our world, both from a literary and environmental perspective.” Admission is free, but attendees should RSVP online.

• Ken Sanders Rare Books in Salt Lake City is hosting an exhibit entitled ”Uconoclasts: Suite One – Literary Utah,” a collaboration between Sanders and artist Trent Call that features the words and photographs of “a dozen literary mavericks from Utah’s past,” including Wallace Thurman, Wallace Stegner, Neal Cassady, Edward Abbey, May Swenson and Bernard DeVoto.  The opening reception is on February 19 (5-9 p.m.), and the exhibit runs through March 14. 

According to a press release, the project “began with a discovery many years ago that an important literary figure of the Harlem Renaissance, Wallace Thurman, had been born in Salt Lake City and had attended the University of Utah, prior to co-founding FIRE!! with Langston Hughes and writing four novels…yet seemingly no one in the state had ever heard of him.”

• Meanwhile, Plan-B Theatre in Salt Lake City will be presenting Wallace, a play about Utah’s literary Wallaces, from March 4 through 14.  The play, written by Jenifer Nii and Debora Threedy, is described in this way on the theater’s website:

“Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner is the dean of Western writers.  Wallace Thurman was a young gay black man at the heart of the Harlem Renaissance.  Both called Salt Lake City home. Their lives intertwine in this rumination on the power of place and the meaning of home.”

• I have one non-Stegner-related item to mention.  Colorado author Paula Reed has several events scheduled to introduce readers to her novel, Hester: The Missing Years of the Scarlet Letter.  Reed was a teacher at Columbine High School during the 1999 shooting that left thirteen dead, including two of her students.  Reed stopped teaching for several years to write romance novels--books with guaranteed happy endings--and Hester is her first book of historical fiction.

On her website, Reed writes that she loves The Scarlet Letter, and notes: “There is…a big gap in the novel, those years between when Hester and Pearl depart from New England and when Hester returns alone. For a reader who has invested her heart in Hester, it is a gap that begs filling.” So Reed wrote Hester, the story of what happened to Hawthorne’s heroine during those missing years.

Reed will discuss Hester at the Tattered Cover (Highlands Ranch) on February 19 (7:30 p.m.), at the Barnes & Noble in Lakewood, Colo. on March 4 (7 p.m.), and at the Boulder Book Store on March 30 (7:30 p.m.).

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