Stegner's heirs object to republication

SAN FRANCISCO — A small publishing house did not have to dig far to unearth a long-buried book Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner wrote a half-century ago about oil exploration in the Middle East.

The owner of Selwa Press, Timothy Barger, is the son of the former president of a U.S. company that hired Stegner in 1956 to pen a promotional piece about its history. Stegner, who lived in Utah as a youth and young man and is known as the literary laureate of the American West, was treated to two weeks in Saudi Arabia and paid about $16,000 for his effort.

For reasons that now are a subject of dispute between Barger and the late author's own son, however, an edited version of Stegner's manuscript was not published in the Arabian American Oil Co.'s in-house magazine until 1967. It was not available to the public until Selwa, based in Vista, Calif., put out a trade edition of "Discovery!" in September without permission from Stegner's estate.

"His particular version of the manuscript was one that was cut up by one of their PR people. It was never put up for sale," said Carl Brandt, Stegner's longtime literary agent. "If Wally had wanted to publish that edition, he would have been on the phone with me saying, 'Let's go, and get Viking to do it."'

Barger has said that he secured the rights to the company-approved version from ARAMCO's Saudi-run successor and that he did not need consent from Stegner's heirs. Selwa's edition was serialized in the company's magazine in 1967 and later published in Beirut as a freebie paperback for employees.

Barger could not be reached for comment Friday.

Brandt disputes Barger's story. He said an amended contract prepared after Stegner submitted his 357-page book to ARAMCO states that Stegner's name could not be attached to any version he did not authorize for mass market distribution.

Stegner, who was a writing professor at Stanford University when he accepted the ARAMCO commission, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for his novel "Angle of Repose." A longtime resident of Los Altos Hills, Calif., he died in 1993 from injuries suffered in a car accident in Santa Fe.

Stegner's son, nature writer Page Stegner, said Friday that he has perused both his father's manuscript, which is in the collection of the University of Utah, and the ARAMCO-issued paperback. While the literary voice in the latter is unmistakably his father's, what's missing are passages that portrayed ARAMCO critically or would have caused problems between the company and Saudi Arabia's leaders, he said.