In a career spanning more than fifty years, Wallace Stegner (1909–93) emerged as the greatest contemporary author of the American West—writing more than two dozen works of history, biography, essays, and fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose.  

Stegner was "critical of the individualistic ethos of the West in all its manifestations: romantic, entrepreneurial and countercultural".  He was passionate about the need to protect our wild places, and our landscape. A.O.Scott wrote:  "Stegner’s books abide in an undervisited stretch of the American canon, like a national park you might drive past on the way to a theme park or ski resort. If you do visit, you find a topography that looks familiar at first glance — as if from an old postcard — but becomes stranger and more deeply shadowed the longer you stay."  

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