Stegner admits to having blurred the boundaries between history and fiction. and some are real and some are imagined.” you break experiences up into pieces, and you put them together in different combinations. I can’t anything you can imagine with except the facts of real life, but you don’t have to be restricted by them. You have to take it after it has happened to you and make some sense out of it. . . But, you can’t “really go out and commit experience Like most writers, Stegner’s fiction starts from his own experience. my personal experiences are all I surely know, and those experiences are very likely to be rooted in places.” “I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from. Stegner’s writings-both fiction and nonfiction-focus mainly on the West. His respect for the natural environment is central to his character. But he describes himself as a writer who sometimes leaves his desk to act in environmental causes. Stegner is often called an environmentalist who also writes. Stegner is, however, well known in several distinct roles: prize-winning novelist (Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose, National Book Award for Spectator Bird) founding director of the Stanford University creative writing program which bears his name biographer, historian, essayist, editor and conservationist. He has to chew or else his jaws lock shut.” You’re stuck in it, you have to keep using it, or else you get ruined by it. Stegner has summed up his present situation: “A talent is a kind of imprisonment. So far, Stegner has written 31 books, a literary achievement of remarkable proportions. In 1987, his tenth novel, Crossing to Safety, was published, 50 years after publication of his first, Remembering Laughter. In April 1990, The Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner was published to wide acclaim. Wallace Stegner, now in his 80’s, is still writing.

Stegner crossing to safety