Synopsis
The writings of both DeVoto and Stegner deeply influenced the way the natural environment of the American West is written about. DeVota became famous for his argumentative essays in the Saturday Review of Literature and Harper's Magazine. Stegner was a driven essayist whose 1960 WILDERNESS LETTER helped establish the 1964 National Wildlife Preservation System in 1964. The lives and literature of both key figures are passionately investigated in this double biography.
| Details | | Publication Date: | 2000-09-01 |
| Size | | Length: | 256 pages | | Height: | 8.3 in | | Width: | 5.8 in | | Thickness: | 0.8 in | | Weight: | 17.6 oz |
Publisher's Note
In this beautifully written account, John Thomas details an intimate portrait of the intellectual friendship between two commanding figures of western letters and the early environmental movement--Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto. The authors of enormously popular works--Stegner most well known for his novels The Big Rock Candy Mountain and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose and DeVoto for his classic history of western exploration, The Course of Empire--they also played important roles in the efforts to stop government and private interests from carving up the vanishing West. Part of the fractious group of public intellectuals at Harvard that included Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., they saw no contradiction between their literary and political selves and entered the public debate with conviction and passion.
Drawing on their writings, personal correspondence, and dozens of articles from the pages of Harper's, where DeVoto was a
columnist for years, Thomas places the two men in a vibrant American tradition, supporters of a national commons owned and cared for by all its citizens. The popular works of Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto remain in print decades after they were first published, and, as Thomas makes clear in this illuminating account, their concern for the western environment continues to resonate today.
In this beautifully written account, John Thomas details an intimate portrait of the intellectual friendship between two commanding figures of western letters and the early enviromental movement - Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto....Drawing on their writings, personal correspondence, and dozens of articles from the pages of Harper's, where DeVoto was a columnist for years, Thomas places the two men in a vibrant American tradition, supporters of a national commons owned and cared for by all its citizens.
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