Wallace Stegner was an American novelist, historian, biographer, and teacher. Widely regarded as the dean of western writers, Stegner evoked a vivid sense of the western United States as a place and of the intimate relationship of the people with that place. Among his best known novels are Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), Angle of Repose (1971), The Spectator Bird (1976), and Crossing to Safety (1987). His works of nonfiction include Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), Wolf Willow (1963), The Sound of Mountain Water (1969), and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992).

Stegner was born on February 18, 1909, on a farm outside Lake Mills, Iowa, the second son of George and Hilda Paulson Stegner. His father, a restless and rootless risk-taker, moved the family to North Dakota, then to Washington state, and then to Saskatchewan, Montana, and Utah. His family...