Wallace Stegner

For refugees from industrial America, the Rocky Mountain states are the suburbs of Eden. Open spaces. Peaceful valleys. Clear, clean water. But the region also commands a huge share of the nation’s remaining mineral wealth. Coal: billions of tons lying just beneath the ground. Uranium: 95 percent of our known reserves. Oil: more of it—trapped in shale—than exists in all the Middle East. The people who live here are divided in their own minds about whether to fight for the magnificent spaciousness they still have, or to collaborate in dirtying it, mining it, and filling it up. What they decide about their future will profoundly affect the future of the whole country.

More than a few writers have become so clinical in describing sex and other natural functions that many readers have yearned for (he polite euphemisms of old. WALLACE STEGNER, novelist and professor, explains how he has resolved the matter for himself and his students.

Novelist and short-story writer who spent his boyhood in Saskatchewan, WALLACE STEGNER is well aware of the literary dilemma he speaks of in this paper. As professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Center at Stanford, he has been able to share his perception with young writers who feel as he does about the West.

Professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Center at Stanford ,Wallace Slegner is widely known for his novels and short stories and for his encouragement to young authors. He has twice been a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, and three of his short stories hare been awarded O. Henry prizes. He heve recalls an unforgettable aspect of Saskatchewan, where he spent five years of his childhood in a small frontier town.

It is the West of Remington and Charles Russell which fires the imagination of WALLACE STEGNER,who as a very young boy lived in a rough and unregenerate hamlet in Saskalchewan. Novelist and short-story writer, Mr. Stegner is professor of English and director of the Creative Writing Center at Stanford University.

A novelist and one of the leading teachers of composition in this country, WALLACE STEGNER divides his time between his English courses at Stanford University and his forays into the remote woods and canyons of the West, trips which renew his spirit and his writing. Western born, he spent his boyhood now under canvas in the deep woods of Washington, now on a remote farm on the Saskatchewan-Montana boundary, and later on the shores of the Missouri. Readers will remember his novels, The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Second Growth.