SOURCE: "The Early Works," in Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature, University of Utah Press, 1983, pp. 21-40.

In the following interview, Etulain helps Stegner probe into his formative years as a fiction writer, including his work on the first short stories and Remembering Laughter.

[Stegner]: Tomlinson, who used to write historical novels about American history, the dark and bloody ground of Kentucky, Indian fights, and so on. More western myth. I remember Tomlinson and Henty; I don't remember much else from that period. But I remember just devouring books, one a day, sometimes more.

We were always moving, and once in a while we would rent a house in which there was a residual library of some kind. I can remember when I was about, I guess, a junior in high school, setting myself the job one summer of reading through the Harvard Classics on...