Excellent biography paints definitive portrait of Stegner

As literary spokesman for the American West, Wallace Stegner has known no equal.

As a proud native son who spent his growing years in Salt Lake City and received his college education from the University of Utah, he was incomparable. Stegner died in 1993 after a distinguished career as novelist, historian, biographer, teacher, environmental activist and a logical model for urbanity.

After two disappointing Stegner biographies by literary figures, Forest Robinson and Jackson Benson, Philip Fradkin, noted journalist and author of the classic, "River No More: The Colorado River and the West," has written what very well may be the definitive biography of Stegner, "Wallace Stegner and the American West."

Because Stegner, whatever else, was blessed with the gift for beautiful writing, it is only fair that his biography be equally well-written. With this classy, well-balanced book, Fradkin has outdone himself, presenting Stegner as the eminent scholar and writer he was, but also as a flawed human being who made mistakes.

Fradkin has produced a highly readable narrative of Stegner's life, yet he criticizes the great man whenever he deserves it without attacking him. Fradkin never intended to write a literary biography. "I wanted to write the story of a man's life and his work and the influence of landscape on him," said Fradkin during a phone interview from his home north of San Francisco.

In Fradkin's opinion, Stegner's life needed a writer who "operates outside the academic world, because Stegner did, too. He always taught only half time as a means of supporting his family. He would have done his writing full time long before he did had he been financially able to do so. He wrote for the general public in clear evocative language. You could never put Stegner in a niche."

It is not that Fradkin claims to have "captured" the man.

"Who knows the inner workings of another's life? I'm not in the family, I'm not a literary scholar, not a close friend. But I see him as a gracious, kind, abrasive presence who always kept his guard up. He had been hurt emotionally as a child by his father, and he had an all-consuming love for his mother."

In researching the book, Fradkin was no armchair historian. He had only met Stegner once, but he traveled to Saskatchewan, Salt Lake City, Canyonlands, Iowa and all the places that helped to mold his subject. "I try to touch history, and for me it's a wonderful, electric charge. He had to stand up straight to the winds on the prairie. He was a man of stature, always stood straight and, in his own words, he was a 'sticker."