Wallace Stegner

At 84 years old, Wallace Stegner physical status not available right now. We will update Wallace Stegner's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Stegner taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University. Eventually he settled at Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program. His students included Wendell Berry, Sandra Day O'Connor, Edward Abbey, Simin Daneshvar, Andrew Glaze, George V. Higgins, Thomas McGuane, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Gordon Lish, Ernest Gaines, and Larry McMurtry. He served as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall and was elected to the Sierra Club's board of directors for a term that lasted 1964–1966. He also moved into a house near Matadero Creek on Three Forks Road in nearby Los Altos Hills and became one of the town's most prominent residents. In 1962, he co-founded the Committee for Green Foothills, an environmental organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the hills, forests, creeks, wetlands and coastal lands of the San Francisco Peninsula.

Stegner's novel Angle of Repose (first published by Doubleday in early 1971) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. It was based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote (first published in 1972 by Huntington Library Press as the memoir A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West). Stegner explained his use of unpublished archival letters briefly at the beginning of Angle of Repose but his use of uncredited passages taken directly from Foote's letters caused a continuing controversy.

In 1977 Stegner won the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird. In 1992, he refused a National Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts because he believed the NEA had become too politicized. Stegner's semi-autobiographical novel Crossing to Safety (1987) gained broad literary acclaim and commercial popularity.

Stegner's non-fiction works include Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West (1954), a biography of John Wesley Powell, the first white man to explore the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Powell later served as a government scientist and was an advocate of water conservation in the American West. Stegner wrote the foreword to and edited This Is Dinosaur, with photographs by Philip Hyde. The Sierra Club book was used in the campaign to prevent dams in Dinosaur National Monument and helped launch the modern environmental movement. A substantial number of Stegner's works are set in and around Greensboro, Vermont, where he lived part-time. Some of his character representations (particularly in Second Growth) were sufficiently unflattering that residents took offense, and he did not visit Greensboro for several years after its publication.

Source

• 1937 Little Brown Prize for Remembering Laughter
• 1945 Houghton-Mifflin Life-in-America Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for One Nation
• 1950–1951 Rockefeller fellowship to teach writers in the Far East
• 1953 Wenner-Gren Foundation grant
• 1956 Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences fellowship
• 1967 Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for All the Little Live Things
• 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angle of Repose
• 1976 Commonwealth Club Gold Medal for The Spectator Bird
• 1977 National Book Award for Fiction for The Spectator Bird
• 1980 Los Angeles Times Kirsch award for lifetime achievement
• 1990 P.E.N. Center USA West award for his body of work
• 1991 California Arts Council award for his body of work
• 1991 Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement
• 1992 National Endowment for the Arts (refused)