A Country in the Mind: Wallace Stegner, Bernard Devoto, History, and the American Land

Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner are two of the most well-known literary men from the American West. Readers may well be familiar with DeVoto's capacious, riveting histories of the region, and Stegner's equally capacious and captivating novels set there. But most don't realize that the two men had a close friendship, cemented during their years together at Harvard and kept alive through decades of correspondence. Thomas, who teaches American history at Brown University (The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison), describes that friendship and the two writers' shared vocation. He opens with elegant, if largely derivative, biographical sketches of each. DeVoto, born in 1897 to a lapsed Catholic father and a lapsed Mormon mother, felt himself a sophisticated, intellectual outsider from provincial Ogden, Utah. Although he escaped east, he never truly escaped the lure of the West, musing and writing about it from his perch as editor of the Saturday Review. Stegner, originally from Iowa, followed his fortune-seeking father around the region, eventually making it to Salt Lake City. The two men were passionate conservationists; indeed, Stegner ""credited"" DeVoto with ""converting him to environmental activism."" Thomas declares that he is interested in the public lives, not the private, hidden goings-on of both men. That stance is refreshing in an age of tell-all psycho-biography; still, the book might have benefited from a bit more about the friendship the two men shared. Stegner paid tribute to his dear friend by writing DeVoto's biography. Thomas has honored both men with an essay that students of the American West won't want to miss. (Nov.)