SOURCE: "Fiction: A Lens on Life," in One Way to Spell Man, Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1982, pp. 18-25.

In the following essay, Stegner discusses the work of the serious fiction writer who he calls "a vendor of the sensuous particulars of life."

The editor of a mass-circulation magazine once told me proudly that all through the Depression he had published not one story dealing with the Depression's peculiar problems. No unemployment, no flophouses, no breadlines, no despair. Nonfiction articles by the dozen dealt with these things, but stories and serials, no. Fiction was for fun, not for illumination. Fiction was phenobarbital, not amphetamine. And even "quality" magazines, which presumably have other views of fiction, are not entirely uninfluenced by considerations of escape. I have known such a magazine, one of the best published in the United States, to refuse a story that every editor on the staff was enthusiastic...