SeattleUte |
03-11-2008 09:01 PM |
Utah's ignorance of Wallace Stegner is a travesty
Why didn't this happen in Utah?:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/bo...prod=permalink
Before Larry McMurtry, Cormac McCarthy or Norman MacLean there was Wallace Stegner. Before Walace Stegner there was no literary canon of the American West comparable to other regions'. Stegner spent most of his career laboring in obscurity but ultimately won both the National Book Award and The Pulitizer Prize. His novels are now often cited as among the greatest of the Twentieth Century.
Stegner spent his youth in Salt Lake City, was practically raised by several Mormon families, played Church Ball, attended MIA, graduated from the University of Utah, etc. But most Utahns don't know this or even who he is, I venture. He ought to be Utah's Faulkner, but Utah has done nothing for him like Mississipi has to promote Faulkner's reputation.
Why? I venture two reasons: First, he wrote some histories of Mormonism that weren't all that flattering. They most emphatically were not "anti-Mormon," but they took a secular perspective not unlike Bushman's. Second, he was an environmentalist. He decried projects such as Glen Canyon Dam and his fiction was revolutionary in that it demystified the American West, and captured its tragic qualities.
He also decried the sixties free love and drug culture, but I doutbt Utah's citizens would hold that against him.
But in all three of these respects he was a visionary, like all great novelists.
I'm afraid that in his home state his works were like pearls before swine (as the saying goes). So Utah has ceded ownership of this great legacy to California. It's sad, a travesty.
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