Mary Page Stegner
1911 ~ 2010
Mary Page Stegner, the wife of celebrated novelist, historian, and environmentalist, Wallace Stegner, died May 15 at The Sequoias in Portola Valley, CA. She was 99.
Mary was born in Dubuque, Iowa in 1911, and attended the University of Iowa where she met her husband of nearly 60 years, Wallace Earle Stegner. Once asked what role she played in his life and career, Wallace replied, "She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed, amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls; also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example) how fortunate I have been to live for 53 years with a woman that bright, alert, charming, and supportive."
Mary is survived by her son, Stuart Page Stegner, daughter-in-law, Lynn Marie Stegner, three grandchildren, Wallace Page Stegner, Rachael Mackenzie Sheedy, and Mary Allison Stegner, and three great-grand
children, Sheridan Stegner, and
Dillon and Emma Sheedy.