SOURCE: "Writing the Land," in The New Republic, Vol. 203, Nos. 8-9, August 20 & 27, 1990, pp. 38-40.

Here, Klinkenborg praises Stegner's traditional narrative style and discusses Stegner as a "Western writer."

At last count, Wallace Stegner had written thirteen novels, two short story collections (their contents are included in the present omnibus), seven books of nonfiction, two collections of essays, unnumbered scattered pieces, and he had edited the letters of Bernard De Voto. His first novel, Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937, when he was twenty-eight, his most recent, Crossing to Safety, fifty years later. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose in 1972 and the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird in 1976. Like Rusty Cullen, the young English cowboy in his short story "Genesis," Stegner might well be "appalled at the effectiveness of his own will."

And yet I think that one New York editor was right when she...