{"product_id":"wallace-stegner-dean-of-western-writers-9781560855194","title":"Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers","description":"\u003cp\u003e In this brisk and riveting biography, Alex Beam takes readers on a journey through Wallace Stegner's life and complicated legacy as one of the twentieth century's best storytellers and chroniclers of the American West. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e In a career that spanned half a century, Stegner wrote fourteen novels and seventeen works of nonfiction. Reared on the Canadian-American frontier and educated in Salt Lake City, Utah, this quintessential Man of the West won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He landed a coveted teaching job at Harvard but, eager to get back to the West, left it for a professorship at Stanford. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e Stegner was a full-throated environmentalist who served on the board of the Sierra Club, worked for the Secretary of the Interior, and wrote the famous Wilderness Letter on the healing power of open spaces. He founded Stanford University's legendary Stegner Writing Fellowship, where his students included Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Larry McMurtry, Sandra Day O'Connor, Tillie Olsen, and Scott Turow. \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e In his later years Stegner wondered if he had lived too deep into the wrong century. He left Stanford when he felt students no longer accorded professors the respect they deserved, and later became embroiled in a plagiarism scandal that tarred his Pulitzer Prize-winning \u003ci\u003eAngle of Repose\u003c\/i\u003e. \u003c\/p\u003e Stegner ended his career with his valedictory masterpiece, \u003ci\u003eCrossing to Safety\u003c\/i\u003e. It was his rare Eastern novel, set in his adopted home of Greensboro, Vermont, where he chose to be buried.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003e Alex Beam has written two novels and seven works of non-fiction, two of them \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e Notable Books of the Year. In 2014, he published \u003ci\u003eAmerican Crucifixion\u003c\/i\u003e, a narrative history of the assassination of the Mormon prophet Joseph Smith. \u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e called it \"an excellent book about the life and death of an utterly uncategorizable man.\" \u003c\/p\u003e A longtime columnist for \u003ci\u003eThe Boston Globe\u003c\/i\u003e, Beam lives with his family in Newton, Massachusetts.\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Signature Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51199458312466,"sku":"9781560855194","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_20fc05a3-3fe7-43ea-b549-f1901d13f666.jpg?v=1744877488","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/wallace-stegner-dean-of-western-writers-9781560855194","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}