Matthew Stewart, author of The Most Beautiful Place on Earth: Wallace Stegner in California, sits down (literally) with host John Murdock to discuss Stegner’s complicated relationship with the American West. A mobile youth left Stegner yearning for deeper roots. In the 1940s, he landed in the hills surrounding San Francisco Bay, an area soon set for expansive growth. Stegner’s interplay with the region and his own personal history led to the Pulitzer Prize winning Angle of Repose, a National Book Award for The Spectator Bird, and his masterful final work Crossing to Safety. Stewart, who received his Ph.D. in history from Syracuse, digs deeply into Stegner’s prose, places, and personal archives to document this quest for home.
Host: John Murdock
Guest: Matthew Stewart
Highlights
2:00 Stewart, man of Geneva and Idaho
5:00 Wallace Stegner 101
7:00 “Geography of hope” and other famous phrases
7:45 A sharp dressed man in the eyes of his student, Wendell Berry
9:30 Ranking the novels
11:30 Mary Hallock Foote controversy
14:00 Life story of a Silicon Valley pioneer
16:45 Family’s outlaw life and death
18:30 California here he comes
19:45 Utopian suburban dreams
22:15 Searching for substance in a “formless non-community”
26:00 Anguished questions of the 1960s
30:15 Fan mail from frustrated parents
33:00 Stuck in Vermont
36:00 Edward Abbey sets the scene
38:00 Finding beauty in the places we know
Resources
Stewart’s bio at FPR
Stegner’s Wilderness Letter
Mary Hallock Foote matter still controversial in 2022
A piece on Stegner and his students
Wendell Kimbrough helps us find our way home
