Sunday, February 21, 2010
Wallace
Stegner was an American historian, novelist, short story writer,
and environmentalist. He taught at the University of Wisconsin
and Harvard University. Eventually Stegner settled at Stanford
University, where he founded the creative writing program. He
served as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart
Udall and was elected to the Sierra Club's board of directors
for a term that lasted 19641966. He also moved into a house
in nearby Los Altos Hills and became one of the town's most prominent
residents.
Stegner's novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize
for Fiction in 1972. Stegner also won the National Book Award
for The Spectator Bird in 1977. Stegner's non-fiction works
include Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell
and the Second Opening of the West (1954), a biography
of John Wesley Powell, who was the first man to explore the Colorado
River through the Grand Canyon and later served as a government
scientist and advocate of water conservation in the American West.
When Kenneth Fields came to Stanford in 1963 as a graduate student
in English, Wallace Stegner ruled the roost. He had founded the
Creative Writing Program and was a celebrated novelist and a master
of nonfictional prose; he was widely known beyond the English
department, from the president of the university on up. He was
also what we would call today an environmentalist, though preservationist
might be a better word. His still-famous Wilderness Letter
from 1960 played a large part in the passage of the Wilderness
Act of 1964.
Kenneth
Fields' collections of poetry are The Other Walker, Sunbelly,
Smoke, The Odysseus Manuscripts, and Anemographia: A Treatise
on the Wind. He has completed the manuscripts of two other
collections: Classic Rough News and Music from Another
Room. His current projects are a novel, Father of Mercies,
and a collection of essays on Mina Loy, H.D., Yvor Winters, Janet
Lewis, J.V. Cunningham, Anne Bradstreet, Emily Dickinson, Ben
Jonson, Wallace Stevens, Jorge Luis Borges, Henri Coulette, and
others.
Fields teaches the Advanced Poetry Writing Workshop for the Stanford
Writing Fellows. He is developing a two-part course in American
film, Men in the Movies: Film Noir and the Western. He delivered
the Russel B. Nye Lecture at Michigan State University's American
Studies Program: "There Stands the Glass: Voices of Alcohol
in Country Music."
Current Year's Courses:
Stanford Writers
Whitman and Dickinson and 20th C Poets
Eros in Modern American Poetry
Graduate Poetry Workshop