Wallace Stegner

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was director of the creative writing program at Stanford University. He is the author of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, Angle of Repose, The Spectacular Bird, a National Book Award winner, and Beyond the Hundreth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Stegner passed away at age 84 in 1993, and Stanford has honored him with a two-year creative writing fellowship called the Stegner Fellowship.

Articles by this Author

Who Are The Westerners?, December 1987 | Vol. 38, No. 8

“Why hasn't the stereotype faded away as real cowboys become less and less typical of Western life? Because we can't or won't do without it, obviously.”

The Power Of Homely Detail, August/September 1985 | Vol. 36, No. 5

Much has changed in Utah since World War II, but outside of the metropolitan center in the Salt Lake Valley, the addiction to rural simplicity and the idea of home is still strong.

Xanadu By The Salt Flats, June/July 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 4

Saltair, the stately pleasure dome that used to rise out of the waters of Great Salt Lake, was the Coney Island of the West.

“By Chaos Out Of Dream”, February/March 1981 | Vol. 32, No. 2

An exploration into the exploration of America

Getting To Know The National Domain, February/March 1979 | Vol. 30, No. 2

One hundred years ago, Congress created two agencies—the U.S. Geological Survey and the Bureau of Ethnology. Both, according to the author, have since “given direction, form, and stimulation to the science of earth and the science of man, and in so doing have touched millions of lives.”

Historian By Serendipity, August 1973 | Vol. 24, No. 5

Conservation Equals Survival, December 1969 | Vol. 21, No. 1

Wise men like Thomas Jefferson have always known how to live with the earth instead of against it. We need to develop a land ethic, with wise stewardship and a respect for the earth.

History Comes To The Plains, June 1957 | Vol. 8, No. 4

The old frontier began to die as the “medicine line” of the 49th Parallel was drawn

Quiet Earth, Big Sky, October 1955 | Vol. 6, No. 6

How the Saskatchewan-Montana prairie country looked a generation ago, and what it meant to a youngster who lived there

Featured Authors

Acheson, Dean

Dean Acheson (1893-1971) was an attorney and statesman who served as Secretary of State from 1949 to 1953 under President Harry Truman. A key architect of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, Acheson stressed the importance of multilateral organizations in the fight against totalitarianism. Prior to his service in the Truman Administration, Acheson clerked for Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, worked at Washington law firm Covington & Burling, and served as Undersecretary of the Treasury for one year under President Franklin Roosevelt.

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Becker, Elizabeth

Elizabeth Becker is an award-winning journalist and the author of several books. Her history When The War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge won accolades from the Robert F. Kennedy book award, while her recent biography of female conflict journalists You Don’t Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War won the 2022 Sperber Book Prize and Harvard’s Goldsmith Book Prize. She is also the author of America’s Vietnam War: A Narrative History for young adults.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brinkley, Douglas

Douglas Brinkley, a distinguished professor of history at Rice University and Contributing Editor of American Heritage, has written more than 20 books, most recently The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (Harper 2009) and The Reagan Diaries (HarperCollins 2007). Brinkley earned his B.A from Ohio State University University in 1982, and his Ph.D. from Georgetown University in 1989.