Life
Stegner was born in Lake Mills, Iowa, and grew up in Great Falls, Montana, Salt Lake City, Utah, and in the village of Eastend, Saskatchewan, which he wrote about in his autobiography Wolf Willow. Stegner says he "lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada". Stegner summered in Greensboro, Vermont. While living in Utah, he joined a Boy Scout troop at an LDS Church (although he himself was a Presbyterian) and earned the Eagle Scout award. He received a B.A. at the University of Utah in 1930. He also studied at the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he received a master's degree in 1932 and a doctorate in 1935.
In 1934, Stegner married Mary Stuart Page. For 59 years they shared a 'personal literary partnership of singular facility,' in the words of Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 13, 1993, from a car accident on March 28, 1993.
Stegner's son, Page Stegner, is a novelist, essayist nature writer and professor emeritus at University of California, Santa Cruz. Page is married to Lynn Stegner, a novelist. Page co-authored "American Places" and edited the 2008 Collected Letters of Wallace Stegner.
Read more about this topic: Wallace Stegner
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“While I enjoy the friendship of the seasons I trust that nothing can make life a burden to me.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Making the best of things is ... a damn poor way of dealing with them.... My whole life has been a series of escapes from that quicksand [ellipses in source].”
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“It had been a moving, tranquil apotheosis, immersed in the transfiguring sunset glow of decline and decay and extinction. An old family, already grown too weary and too noble for life and action, had reached the end of its history, and its last utterances were sounds of music: a few violin notes, full of the sad insight which is ripeness for death.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)