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)
"He was precocious, alert, intelligent, brash, challenging,
irreverent, literary, self-conscious, insecure, often
ostentatiously crude, sometimes insufferable", Wallace Stegner says
of Bernard DeVoto, who, in the words of a childhood acquaintance,
was also "the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw". Between
the disagreeable boy and the literary lion, a life unfolds, full of
comedy and drama, as told in this definitive biography, which
brings together two exemplary American men of letters.
Born within a dozen years of one another in small towns in Utah,
both men were, as Stegner writes, "novelists by intention, teachers
by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region
that shaped us". From this unique 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 of American letters in the twentieth
century.
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