Some authors diminish after death. Others become giants.
Wallace Stegner is becoming a giant. Literarily, spiritually and in the marketplace, Stegner's stock is soaring.Not only are his thoughts and style becoming more prized, but Stegner memorabilia are hot items. A signed first edition of his novel "The Potter's House" - once an "iffy buy" at $300 - is now valued at $1,200. Collectors everywhere are scrambling for letters, rough drafts, photographs and first editions.
Now, thanks to the Stegner family itself, the University of Utah leads on all fronts.
"Stanford University is surrendering its Stegner materials to us," says the university's Everett Cooley, with a gleam not unlike Grant at Appomattox. And at 3 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 5, the school will sponsor an afternoon of "Bringing Wallace Stegner Home" at the University of Utah Research Park to honor the writer and his work. Interest has been high, so the event is an invitation-only affair with limited seating.
Wallace Stegner's papers will be presented to the university at that time, the announcement of a new Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources and the Environment at the College of Law will be made, and Red Butte Press will unveil its latest - and most prized - limited edition book, Stegner's "Wilderness Letter."
Of the 100 copies, 75 will be sold to the public at more than $500 apiece.
"It's a beautiful book," says Cooley, editor at Red Butte Press. "And it is timely. The next issue of the university magazine will be devoted to Stegner. We're excited."
Printed by Day Christensen on the famous Allen press, "Wilderness Letter" features etchings by Utah artist Douglas Snow and is set in Univers Light type - a typeface invented the year Stegner wrote the letter. The matched cover boards are made of cottonwood and were milled by Christopher B. Darais. The publication was made possible through the generosity of Catherine B. and Claudius Y. Gates.
As for the letter itself, Stegner wrote it in 1960 to David E. Pesonen of the Wildlife Research Center at the University of California. Over the years the wilderness movement has canonized the epistle as scripture. Writes the author:
What I want to speak for is not so much the wilderness uses, valuable as those are, but the wilderness idea, which is a resource in itself. Being an intangible and spiritual resource, it will seem mystical to the practical-minded - but then anything that cannot be moved by a bulldozer is likely to seem mystical to them.
Stegner's connection to Utah was deep and lifelong. He spent his formative years here, attending East High School, playing tennis and enrolling at the University of Utah. On several return trips he would muse about the changes in the politics and the place itself, tour his old haunts and meet with his lifetime friends.
His novel "Recapitulation" is about a young diplomat who returns to Utah after many years to awaken some echoes and lay his ghosts. The diplomat was a thinly disguised Wallace Stegner.
In his essay "At Home in the Fields of the Lord," Stegner wrote: "I have always envied people with a hometown. . . . That is why I have been astonished, on a couple of recent trips through Salt Lake City, to find a conviction growing in me that I am not as homeless as I had thought. At worst, I had thought myself an Ishmael; at best, a half stranger in the city where I had lived the longest, a Gentile in New Jerusalem. But a dozen years of absence from Zion, broken only by two or three short revisitings, have taught me different. I am as rich in a hometown as anyone. . . ."
Now the letters, manuscripts and many personal items belonging to the man have "come home" to Utah for safekeeping.
And there will be a fine, high-minded, new publication of one of his most poignant pieces of writing to greet them.