Wallace Stegner and the Great Community

IN THE SPRING of 1958 I received notice that I had been given a Stegner Fellowship for the next school year at Stanford University. I assumed, properly enough, that I was going to be dealing with people my own age who would know a great deal more than I did. Clearly, I needed to prepare myself.

My wife and new daughter and I were staying in Lexington, Kentucky, that summer, and I decided that I would read the works of Wallace Stegner. The only thing I had read by him up to then was Field Guide to the Western Birds, published by Ballantine in a collection called New Short Novels 2. In those days I assumed that anything that interested me had already interested everybody else, and so I was surprised to find that the university library yielded only his first novel, Remembering Laughter, and his second book of stories, The City of the Living. I found a copy of the first short story collection, The Women on the Wall, in a used book store.