DISCOVERY! THE SEARCH FOR ARABIAN OIL, by Wallace Stegner, Selwa Press, 259 pages, $24.95, softcover

Admirers of Wallace Stegner, a literary icon to numerous Utahns and other Westerners, will be happy to see "Discovery!" a hidden manuscript now published by Selwa Press. (There will be a hardcover, fully annotated edition in September.)

Stegner is easily one of America's great novelists and historians. I had the pleasure of attending a history workshop he taught one summer when I was a University of Utah graduate student. He was as compelling and charismatic in person as he continues to be in print — a master of language but in a self-effacing, eloquent way.

He is well-known for "Big Rock Candy Mountain," "Joe Hill," "Remembering Laughter," "The Spectator Bird" and numerous other titles. Often he turned carefully researched history into beautiful, graceful novels.

As a college professor I assigned many of his essays to my history students to read — and there was always at least one student in every class who connected with him to the point of excitement.

But who knew that Stegner was the first to tell the story of how Saudis started sending oil to the West? This one got buried. In 1955, Stegner, then a lesser known Stanford University professor of creative writing, was asked to write a history of the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO).

Although writing more important interpretive books and novels, he accepted a commission to write what would be a corporate history. He went to Arabia to collect documents and interview numerous men and women engaged in the oil industry. He was only there two weeks. Then he crafted the history of an oil company that was already changing the global economy.

Unfortunately, he finished the book just as the Suez crisis erupted in July 1956, when Jamal Abd al-Nasir, president of Egypt, announced that his government was nationalizing the Suez Canal. This resulted in panic in several nations and military action by Israeli and British forces, as Nasir became the hero of Arab opposition to the West.

It was not considered a good time for the book — so Aramco shelved the project. "Discovery!" didn't get into print as a paperback until 1971, when it was published in Lebanon by an obscure press. By the following year, Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for "Angle of Repose," another story of settlement in a desert — the American West.

Today, "Discovery!" makes an interesting contrast with Stegner's literary works. He recognized the importance of the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and found it comparable to the 19th-century American desert.

Dramatically, he wrote that "oil men began to tinker with the machines that made water and climate, and the smells that drove away the flies. And long before anyone knew the phrase, a revolution of rising expectations had begun. Saudi Arabia would never be the same."

As a corporate work, Stegner's interpretation was generally favorable to the oil company — but he did not ignore any of the disputes that characterized the period.

This little book is a historical jewel.

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E-mail: dennis@desnews.com