Stegner became a professor at Harvard. But he left the prestige and the lush green of the East to go back West. He dug in at Stanford where he founded the creative writing program and bought a house in the foothills of the Coast Range, “within sight of the last sunsets on the continent.” What a few years in the East had taught him was how much he craved the West. The western landscape had modified his perceptions. “If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality I am some variant of it.” And as the years progressed, he trained his lens—and the lenses of many other gifted students—on the West.
The frontier was “hope’s native home,” Stegner maintained, a golden prize that drew millions away from the pull of the East. But it required more than hope to settle the West; serious adaptations were needed. And an author who proposed to write about the West had to be similarly adaptable. In “Thoughts in a Dry Land,” Stegner wrote that in order to create literature out of the West: “Our first and hardest adaptation was to learn all over again how to see. Our second was to learn to like the new forms and colors and light and scale when we had learned to see them. Our third was to develop new techniques, a new palette, to communicate them.”6 In his Pulitzer prize-winning novel Angle of Repose, he demonstrated a mastery of all three. But just as importantly, he told a story that communicated, more beautifully and more tragically than any essay or dissertation could have, how a great novel of the West can be written.
