Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner

"In Wallace Stegner's lifetime, the New York Times dubbed him the "dean of Western writers," and fellow writer Edward Abbey called him "the only living American writer worthy of the Nobel." Stegner never wrote an autobiography and claimed that "[n]othing ever happened to me but long hours on my rump in front of my typewriter." Yet those same hours he spent on his rump, "warming up his fingers" by typing letters to loved ones, politicians, fellow writers, and readers, offer a richly collaged sense of the life and mind of this multifaceted writer." "Spanning from 1933 to 1993, these letters range from playful notes to Mary Page, to whom he would be married for over fifty years, to correspondence that shows a lifelong passion for the details of the political and physical histories of the many places Stegner called home. He put as much care and thought into notes to his young grandchildren as he did into those for colleagues, and in each piece the common speech quietly testifies to the power of the written word." "Brought together for the first time, these letters paint a picture of Wallace Stegner not only as a lauded educator but also as a man who never stopped learning, never stopped questioning and pushing deeper into the foundation of who he was and where he was from. Stegner claimed that his "involvement in history [was] personal, not scholarly." This collection of personal writing might then provide the best history of a man who shaped American writing from his typewriter."--BOOK JACKET.Stegner, Page is the author of 'Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781593761684 and ISBN 1593761686.