Historian, biographer, essayist, short-story writer, and, above all, novelist--Wallace Stegner has been recognized as a genuine Westerner who wrote of the West with deep knowledge, empathy, and great sophistication. Often ignored by the Eastern literary establishment, he won a 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose (1971) and a 1977 National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976), neither of which were reviewed by The New York Times Book Review. Earlier honors for his writing include three O. Henry first prizes for short stories in 1942, 1950, and 1954. Engaged during the 1960s by U.S. interior secretary Stewart Udall as a special environmental adviser, Stegner wrote critically about Western economic development and exploitation of natural resources, and late in life he became a guru to the environmental movement. It would be hard to find a modern American writer who has represented his region as completely as Stegner.

Wallace Earle Stegner was born in Lake...