Overview

"Born within a dozen years of one another in small towns in Utah, Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner were, as Stegner writes, ""novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us."" From this vantage point, Stegner follows DeVoto's path from his beloved but not particularly congenial Utah to the even less congenial Harvard where, galvanized by the disregard of the aesthetes around him, he commenced a career that, over three and a half decades, would embrace nearly every sort of literary enterprise: from modestly successful novels to prize-winning Western histories, from the editorship of the Saturday Review to a famously combative, long-running monthly column in Harper's, ""The Easy Chair."" A nuanced portrait of a stormy literary life, Stegner's biography of DeVoto is also a window on the tumultuous world."

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A battlefield panorama of the literary world from 1920 to 1955. --New York Times Book Review. One of the best-written biographies ... It consistently goes beyond the limits of its subject to illuminate what it meant to be a writer in the America of the '30s, '40s, and '50s. --Time.

Novelist Stegner tends to identify with writers like himself: westerners who try to forge a literary identity far from the East Coast establishment. Like Walter Clark (see above), Bernard DeVoto-novelist, critic, historian, editor-was an outsider both in his native Utah (where he was baptized a Catholic) and in the East, despite his Harvard education. When Stegner's biography first appeared in 1974, Kirkus didn't appreciate how much Stegner personally seems to have invested in his life of a writer we thought unworthy of his superior talents. A thoroughly agreeable book about a thoroughly disagreeable man Kirkus put it: an exhaustive biography of such a minor literary personality. But Stegner's valentine to his friend also captures the times in which he thrived-it's a remarkable look at the literary politics of an era, and a man who found himself at its red-hot center. We wondered why Stegner cares so much, but in retrospect, the answer seems clearer. (Kirkus Reviews)

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