A Literary Environment

Following soon after Angle of Repose, Stegner accepted a project so personal he almost passed on it. The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, forced Stegner’s to revisit the death of his dear friend. The work so affected Stegner that he described the writing book as “complicated by the fact that I had known Benny DeVoto very well. It’s always more difficult to write about someone you know well.”

Stegner made a profound mark on the literary world and the environmental community while following in the footsteps of his friend who had fought to preserve wild spaces in the west and defeat dams including one in Dinosaur National Monument in the 1950s. Stegner’s book This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and Its Magic Rivers is often credited with helping to kill two proposals in 1956. His immense love for the West would continue to cultivate his writing. During the 1980s Stegner’s work included Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature (1983), andAmerican Places (1985) co-written with his son Page.