Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner – Life, Career, and Famous Quotes

Explore the full life, career, and enduring legacy of Wallace Stegner — the American novelist, historian, and environmentalist. Discover his famous quotes, contributions to literature and conservation, and the lessons he offers today.

Introduction

Wallace Earle Stegner (February 18, 1909 – April 13, 1993) was an American novelist, historian, essayist, and environmental advocate whose deep empathy for the American West shaped both his fiction and nonfiction. Often hailed as “The Dean of Western Writers,” Stegner blended the literary, historical, and ecological into writings that examine identity, place, and moral responsibility.

His works—particularly Angle of Repose, Crossing to Safety, and Beyond the Hundredth Meridian—continue to resonate for their blend of narrative richness and philosophical insight. In an era of ecological crisis and cultural uprooting, Stegner’s meditations on “geography of hope,” wilderness, memory, and human ambition remain deeply relevant.

In what follows, you will find a richly detailed biography, an exploration of his thought and influence, and a curated selection of his most memorable quotes.

Early Life and Family

Wallace Stegner was born on February 18, 1909, in Lake Mills, Iowa, to George Stegner and Hilda (née Paulson).

Stegner later wrote that he “lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada,” a restlessness that shaped his sensitivity to place and displacement.

Tragically, during Stegner’s young adulthood, his mother died of cancer, and his father committed suicide, events that left emotional scars and perhaps deepened his understanding of loss, mortality, and memory.

In 1934, Stegner married Mary Stuart Page, starting a literary partnership that would last nearly six decades until his death. Page Stegner, became a writer, historian, and editor (notably of his father’s letters).

Youth and Education

Stegner’s early schooling and intellectual hunger unfolded amid shifting geographies. In Utah, though he was raised Lutheran, he joined a Boy Scout troop with a Mormon congregation and eventually achieved the Eagle Scout rank.

He enrolled at the University of Utah, earning a Bachelor of Arts in 1930. University of Iowa, where he obtained a Master’s degree in 1932 and ultimately a Ph.D. in 1935.

His doctoral work included research on the geologist-writer Clarence Edward Dutton, foreshadowing Stegner’s own intertwined interests in landscape, science, and narrative.

While at Iowa, Stegner also immersed himself in the writing culture of the time and deepened his literary ambitions.

Career and Achievements

Emergence as a Writer & Academic

Stegner’s first novel, Remembering Laughter, appeared in 1937, marking the start of a prolific literary career.

His career as an educator ran in parallel. He taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard before finding a long-term home at Stanford University, where he founded its creative writing program.

Literary Highlights & Honors

Stegner’s most celebrated novel is Angle of Repose (1971), for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972.

Another standout, The Spectator Bird (1976), earned Stegner the National Book Award in 1977. Crossing to Safety (1987) later became perhaps his most widely beloved work, noted for its subtle, emotionally rich depiction of friendship and marriage in midlife.

His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954), a biography of Powell and an ecological treatise on the American frontier. This Is Dinosaur (1985), a collaboration aimed at preserving a threatened national monument, signaling his active environmental commitment.

Beyond writing and teaching, Stegner played a public intellectual role. In the 1960s he served on the board of the Sierra Club and co-founded the Committee for Green Foothills to protect lands around the San Francisco Peninsula.

Stegner’s use of Mary Hallock Foote’s unpublished letters in Angle of Repose later sparked controversy over attribution and appropriation. Some critics contend he borrowed passages without sufficient credit; defenders argue that his usage enriched the novel’s authenticity.

Historical Milestones & Context

Stegner’s writing matured through a century of profound transformation in the American West. He witnessed expansion, mechanization, environmental degradation, social change, and shifting American values. His work maps that historical trajectory with a moral lens.

He coined the idea of the “geography of promise”—that the West embodied a symbolic frontier of possibility, a tension between hope and exploitation.

His refusal of the National Medal and public stands reflect a strain in his thinking: integrity in art and politics, and wariness of institutional co-option.

Legacy and Influence

Stegner’s influence lives on in several major ways:

1. Stegner Fellowship (Stanford): One of the most prestigious two-year creative writing fellowships in the U.S., supporting emerging writers.

2. Wallace Stegner Chair / Prizes: Endowed chairs and literary prizes carry his name (e.g. Western American Studies at Montana State) to honor his combination of literature and environmental commitment.

3. Cultural Memory: Stegner is now regarded not just as a Western writer, but as a morally engaged American writer whose reflections on place, community, and nature transcend regional labels.

4. Environmental and Literary Education: His essays, letters, and books continue to inform curricula in American studies, environmental humanities, and creative writing.

Some critics, however, grapple with the ethical questions raised by his creative appropriation of Foote’s writings. The debate invites ongoing reflection on originality, voice, and literary responsibility.

Personality and Talents

Stegner was known to be intellectually generous, quietly rigorous, and deeply attuned to subtle emotional truths. His teaching style emphasized both craft and integrity: he would urge students not to write with agendas but to tell what feels true.

His writing voice combines clarity, warmth, and moral gravity. He moved between sweeping landscapes and intimate human cares, and he carried in his prose a sense that literature must reckon with place as well as people.

Stegner once said, “In fiction I think we should have no agenda but to tell the truth.” This remark reflects a conviction that art is most powerful when it remains anchored in the real, even while embracing imagination.

He was also modest about his role: as his biography notes, he disliked pomp and preferred that his legacy lie in the work itself.

Famous Quotes of Wallace Stegner

Here is a curated selection of Stegner’s most resonant quotations, spanning writing, nature, life, and wisdom:

• “Most things break, including hearts. The lessons of life amount not to wisdom, but to scar tissue and callus.”

• “A teacher enlarges people in all sorts of ways besides just his subject matter.”

• “It doesn't seem to me that life conforms to systems. Only systems conform to systems.”

• “We simply need that wild country available to us... For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”

• “You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time.”

• “Largeness is a lifelong matter — sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are.”

• “It is the beginning of wisdom when you recognize that the best you can do is choose which rules you want to live by, and it's persistent and aggravated imbecility to pretend you can live without any.”

• “You achieve stature only by being good enough to deserve it, by forcing even the contemptuous and indifferent to pay attention…”

These quotes reflect Stegner’s contemplative posture toward limits, responsibility, and the relationship between human beings and their environment.

Lessons from Wallace Stegner

1. Rooting identity in place matters
   Stegner teaches us that landscape and history shape consciousness. To ignore the particular is to risk abstraction and alienation.

2. Truth over agenda
   His insistence that fiction should not carry overt agenda but convey truth encourages writers to trust complexity and subtlety over polemic.

3. Moral humility in creation
   The controversy around Angle of Repose reminds us that using another’s words demands ethical clarity. Writers must be attentive to attribution, voice, and the boundaries of appropriation.

4. Environmental stewardship as civic responsibility
   Stegner saw wilderness as not just aesthetic but essential to human sanity and culture. Protecting the wild is part of caring for ourselves.

5. Growth as a lifelong undertaking
   He spoke of “largeness” as not a fixed state but something to be pursued. We are never finished as individuals or communities.

6. Teaching is creation
   Through his students, Stegner’s influence multiplied. His life illustrates that nurturing others is part of leaving a durable legacy.

Conclusion

Wallace Stegner’s life and work stand at the intersection of literature, moral reflection, and environmental consciousness. Whether through the intimate friendships of Crossing to Safety, the layered histories of Angle of Repose, or the passionate appeal of Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, his writing beckons us to reckon with place, memory, and responsibility.

In an age of climate crisis and cultural flux, Stegner’s voice remains not a nostalgic echo but a living challenge: to keep wilderness, moral courage, and human dignity alive. Explore his novels and essays, reflect on his quotes, and let your own sense of belonging deepen in the world he so deeply loved.