Mark Fiege is a professor of history and Wallace Stegner Chair in Western American Studies at Montana State University. He is the author of The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States. Michael J. Lansing is a professor of history at Augsburg University. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics. Leisl Carr Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University. She is the author of The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin. Their most recent edited volume, Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country, was published by Bison Books last month.

Wallace Stegner is an iconic western writer. His works of fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose and Big Rock Candy Mountain, as well as his nonfiction books and essays introduced the beauty and character of the American West to thousands of readers. Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country assesses his life, work, and legacy in light of contemporary issues and crises. Along with Stegner’s achievements, the contributors show how his failures offer equally crucial ways to assess the past, present, and future of the region.

I really only want to say that we may love
a place and still be dangerous to it.

—Wallace Stegner, “Thoughts in a Dry Land”

In May 2019 the Ivan Doig Center for the Study of the Lands and Peoples of the North American West, in partnership with the Wallace Stegner Chair in Western American Studies (both at Montana State University), invited scholars to Bozeman to consider Wallace Stegner’s legacy and its meaning for our times. It was fitting for Montana State to host such an event. Stegner held important ties to the university, and nearly thirty years after his death—despite growing attention to Indigenous and other writers whose work expressed the vast range of human experience in North America—this long gone white male author still seemed to have enduring interest for readers whose understanding of the West he had shaped. What was at stake in the symposium, however, was less the beauty of Stegner’s prose, his ability to tell a good story, or his powerful evocations of the western landscape, and more what he and his work might do for readers—white readers especially—who live in a moment of accelerating regional, national, and planetary turmoil and the profound precarity and uncertainty that comes with it.

Stegner was familiar with disorienting change, and he rode its unsettled currents across most of the twentieth century. He was born in Lake Mills, Iowa, in 1909, and his childhood was marked by a family constantly on the move, to North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, and Utah. He earned degrees at the University of Utah (1930) and the University of Iowa (1932, 1935) before teaching literature and writing at Utah, Wisconsin, and Harvard. In 1946, he moved to Stanford University, where he established a creative writing program that attracted talent from across the country. As an author, he focused on the American West, first gaining fame for his novel The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943) as well as for nonfiction books such as Mormon Country (1942), One Nation (1945), Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1953), and This Is Dinosaur (1955). One of the leading writers of post–World War II America, especially his fiction, Stegner in his prime won the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1972) and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1977). When he passed away in 1993 from injuries suffered in a car accident in New Mexico, he stood out for his commitment to, and critique of, the American West.

Before and after Stegner’s death, scholars summarized, contextualized, and assessed his life, work, and significance. Numerous interviews, biographies, and compilations explored the range of his experiences, thought, and work. Many commentators could not help but memorialize, even in touching personal terms, the influence of an author who wrote so beautifully about the West and the sense of place that he found in it. Yet even the encomiums expressed a sense of difference, of friction, of more troubled, conflicted, and darker sides to the man. After his death, Jackson Benson, one of Stegner’s former students, published a biography that delved deeply into the author who spent his career “constantly cast in the role of outsider,” writing against the grain and taking on “the role of a realist who is to tell us disagreeable truths.”

More recently, New York Times critic A. O. Scott—the type of eastern literary arbiter who irritated Stegner—noted the overlooked richness of Stegner’s work, how it resists easy pigeonholing and how it often leads many readers into uncertain, thought-provoking terrain. “Stegner’s books abide in an undervisited stretch of the American canon,” Scott observed, “like a national park you might drive past on the way to a theme park or ski resort. If you do visit, you find a topography that looks familiar at first glance—as if from an old postcard—but becomes stranger and more deeply shadowed the longer you stay.”

Scholars who remained for long stretches in that bypassed national park recognized a part of Stegner’s work that rises like a ridgeline from dark canyons into light. Historian Charles Rankin saw Stegner as an “optimist, truth-seeker, pragmatic realist,” and “dreamer of a better society” who “forever felt an acute deficiency for having never ‘stuck’ in a western place long enough to become part of it.” Stegner “championed adaptation” to the limitations of the western environment and, despite his bitterness towards his fellow human beings’ exploitative and prejudicial behavior, believed that people “have the capacity to do right.” Scott similarly pointed out Stegner’s fondness for the word “solidarity,” an ideal incompletely achieved by settlers and their descendants.

Stegner was not without his critics. In Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays: A Tribal Voice (1996), Elizabeth Cook-Lynn (Crow Creek Sioux), a scholar we acknowledge and honor, asserted that Stegner egregiously adhered to frontier and vanishing Indian myths and thereby created “the potential to cut off dialogue and condemn to oblivion or absurdity Indian writers who want to continue the drama.” Stegner’s myopic claim of indigeneity, she wrote, obfuscates the reality that the settler “invasion of the New World was never a movement of moral courage at all; rather, it was a pseudoreligious and corrupt socioeconomic movement for the possession of resources.” In Stegner’s search for belonging and understanding of the places he held dear, he used concepts and language current among white European American writers and intellectuals of his time to reify national myths that emphasized the primacy of the settlers who colonized the continent and who, along with their descendants, benefited from national policies that privatized land and enabled the ruthless extraction of resources from it.

Yet, as Scott noted, Stegner also raged against some of the consequences of settler myths and the exploitation they justified, whether or not he fully recognized the origins of the damage. In doing so, Stegner took the first step toward peeling back the mask of the settler perspective and rethinking the region’s and nation’s past, present, and future. As Scott stated, we should assess Stegner critically while engaging his work: “To hold Stegner exempt from criticism seems to me as shortsighted as refusing to read him.” Building on the criticism of Cook-Lynn and others, yet following Stegner through the shadowed canyons of his work, challenges us to unsettle the western American past in its fullness with the objective of finding a better way forward.