The Growing Literature About Wallace Stegner's Contributions To Our Regional Identity. By Gregory McNamee WALLACE STEGNER'S death on April 13, 1993, was not untimely. He had lived to the respectable age of 85, after all...had lived to see the wide-open West of his early years carved by bulldozers, devoured by cities, and filled with people. Untimely, no, but perhaps ironic, for Stegner died from complications following an automobile accident, a victim of the technological world he had long decried. The books about Stegner are beginning to appear; and to judge by them, it may take another 85 years to appreciate fully his contributions to the American West. Those contributions were many, not the least of them his having helped shape the writing not only of the region but also of points east, thanks to the scores of graduates from the Stanford University writing program that bears his name. One of them was Edward Abbey, the Jeremiah of Western environmentalism, who cultivated a rough-and-ready, self-taught image, but who once said that he became a writer not in the wilds of the desert but in the ivied halls of Palo Alto. Another is Wendell Berry, the Kentucky poet and farmer. Still another is Ken Kesey, who combined the cowboy ethos with hippie sentiment to shape novels of the New West like Sometimes A Great Notion and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Stegner was of the last generation to see a truly frontier West. His father was a land speculator who dragged his family from one dusty town to another in search of easy riches, and who, Stegner recalled, "died broke and friendless in a fleabag hotel, having in his lifetime done more human and environmental damage than he could have repaired in a second lifetime." His mother was old at 30, broken by a rootless marriage marked by one humiliation after another. It was not an auspicious beginning. The transient youth found his home in the small libraries of towns like Yuma, Kanab, Alamosa, and Rock Springs. The books he read there, books like John Wesley Powell's Explorations of the Colorado River and Mark Twain's Roughing It, helped him put his life into a native context; when he began to write, first articles and then books, he did so as a proud Westerner, disinclined to apologize to Eastern readers for living by choice in the Great American Outback. Stegner's was an important shift in attitude. Most contemporary writing about the West concerned virtuous white women kidnapped by howling savages, straight-jawed lawmen battling snake-eyed gunslingers, and fifth-column renegades attempting to thwart Manifest Destiny. Much of that writing came from the pens of men and women who never saw the West. One of them, the enormously popular writer Karl May, penned his dime novels inside the walls of a German prison while he did time for fraud. Instead, Stegner wrote of the realities of Western life: whisky-soaked cities, violent mining towns, ramshackle fishing villages and line camps, dusty farmyards. He wrote of honest emotions, of pain and love and loss. He wrote splendid novels like Angle of Repose and The Big Rock Candy Mountain, evoking all that is right and wrong with the West: a land full of riches, but full of fools' promises as well. He wrote books of nonfiction, too, that helped restore a sense of real history to the backcountry. His collection of essays, Mormon Country, remains one of the best books ever to introduce Latter Day Saints' doctrine and culture to non-Mormon readers; his Beyond the Hundredth Meridian recounted the amazing feats of his boyhood hero John Wesley Powell as he surveyed the post-Civil War West; his Wolf Willow portrays a Colorado, Alberta, Utah, and Montana that exist now only in books and a few aging memories. Years ago, Wallace Stegner called the American West "hope's native home." In the last decade of his life he grew less buoyant. Regarding the West as "less a place than a process," he came to see reason to abandon hope at its gates, now that its great cities had grown "to the limits of their water and beyond, like bacterial cultures overflowing the edges of their agar dishes." One of the few surprises in Jackson Benson's new biography, Wallace Stegner (Viking, $32.95), in fact, is that at the end of his life Stegner was so depressed about the rape of the American West that he intended to move to Vermont, where, he rightly maintained, there was more wild nature to be found than in California. Wallace Stegner's passing made the front pages of papers on the coasts, the inner or back pages of papers in the Western states he had long fought to describe and protect. Less ephemerally, it has also yielded a number of books. Foremost among them is Benson's, a somewhat reverential study that will likely disappoint students of Stegner the conservationist and regional chauvinist; for this, we must turn to Mary Stegner's gathering of celebratory essays, The Geography of Hope (Sierra Club Books, $14.95). Benson, however, has much to say about the content of Stegner's books, so that his biography serves well as an on-the-fly compendium of literary criticism. Charles Rankin's collection, Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer (University of New Mexico Press, $17.95), is more useful. The strongest of the essays deal with Stegner's work on many fronts--as conservationist, historian, freelance writer and teacher. Among these essays are James R. Hepworth's "Wallace Stegner: The Quiet Revolutionary," William Kittredge's "The Good Rain," and Robert H. Keller's "Joe Hill Ain't Never Died," the last a careful examination of Stegner's novel, Joe Hill, that looks along the way at whether Stegner quite understood all the facts in the matter of Hill, a labor agitator executed for sedition during World War I. (Perhaps, Keller concludes, Stegner did not.) All three books have their considerable uses, but they leave room for another that combines their virtues, one that fully accounts for Stegner's place in modern Western literature, that examines where Stegner got it right and where he got it wrong, that travels the ground to see up close the landscapes that shaped Stegner's character. In the meanwhile, we can content ourselves with returning to Stegner's own work, which will continue to influence the literature of the West for years to come.

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