Stegner, Wallace (Earle) (1909-1993)

US writer and educator. He taught English at several major universities; he was at Stanford University 1945-71. He published over two dozen novels, collections of short stories and essays, and historical works; The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943) was among his most popular novels while Angel of Repose (1972) won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. His non-fiction works include biographies of John Wesley Powell, Joe Hill, and Bernard DeVoto.

He was born in Lake Mills, Iowa. The son of Scandinavian immigrants, he lived in a half-dozen western states with his family before they settled in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was educated at the Universities of Utah (BA 1930) and Iowa (PhD 1935). His first book was Restoring Laughter (1937). Most of his works dealt with the American West, which he viewed with a mixture of scepticism about its stereotypes, yet respect for its strengths. In his later years he increasingly expressed his concern for the damage being done to the natural environment of the West.