A row of painted brick storefronts speaks to me. I just moved to Salt Lake City, but I can imagine how this small street in the Sugar House neighborhood might have felt before the modern offices and stucco apartments moved in. One of the stores catches my eye with a bright red façade, striped awning and rooftop sign, tucked between an antiques shop and a defunct plumber’s office. I’ve been wandering the streets, feeling disoriented after leaving home for the first time. A bookstore seems like a natural place to find my bearings.
Inside, the shop smells of cedar and old paper. It’s quiet but for the rustle of pages as a man flips through a coffee table book. It feels like the bookstore in San Francisco where I worked when I was growing up. I weave through narrow aisles, past sections devoted to history, psychology and romance. At the back of the store, where the lighting is dim and the air is heavy with dust, I find a small shelf labeled “Utah Writers.” A familiar name repeats across the top three rows: Wallace Stegner.
Back in California, Stegner is known as a Bay Area icon. A prolific author of essays, histories and semi-autobiographical novels, he spent most of his life living in the Los Altos Hills and teaching at Stanford, where he founded the creative writing program and taught students like the poet Wendell Berry, environmental firebrand Edward Abbey, Western novelist Larry McMurtry and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. Born in Iowa, he summered in Vermont and died in New Mexico. But he once called Utah home.
It is aridity that gives the air its special dry clarity; aridity that puts brilliance in the light and polishes and enlarges the stars.
I pick up a paperback with mountains on the cover that look like the Wasatch. Published in 1992, “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West” was Stegner’s last book, a collection of essays that feels relevant to me. Growing up, I thought you couldn’t get more west than the beach, but the drive here — a hypnotic marathon of basin, range and sagebrush — showed I’ve got a lot to learn. His photo on the back cover shows an outdoorsy old professor: sun-worn but sweet, with soft features and thick white hair. I decide to take the book home.
‘His search for a home’
I soon learn that Stegner was born in 1909, in Lake Mills, Iowa, a town of around 1,300 people near the Minnesota state line. But he didn’t stay long. His father had a penchant for chasing get-rich-quick schemes that gave Stegner a peripatetic upbringing. His childhood spanned 20 locations across eight states and Canada. He finally found some stability in his adolescence, when the family settled down in Salt Lake City — though his father still ran a speakeasy, an illegal drinking establishment under Prohibition.
By comparison, Stegner’s adult life was a model of patient achievement. He earned master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Iowa. He spent 34 years in academia, mostly at Stanford — though he lectured in Greece on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1963. He was remarkably productive, publishing 14 novels, 16 nonfiction books, seven collections of essays or short stories, and a chapbook. His novels won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Of course, to friends, he was simply Wally, who was regimented but gentle, and loved a prank.
Stegner wrote extensively about the West, in all forms of writing. “Mormon Country” (1942) paints an affectionate portrait of Latter-day Saint culture across the Intermountain region. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West” (1954) is a definitive biography of the explorer who first traveled the Grand Canyon. “Big Rock Candy Mountain” (1943) is a novel that echoes the author’s rootless childhood; in its sequel, “Recapitulation” (1979), the character who most resembles Stegner returns to Salt Lake City, attends a family funeral and reconciles with his troubled past. “If there is one recurring theme in Stegner’s work,” writes Alex Beam in “Wallace Stegner: Dean of Western Writers,” published this year by Signature Books, “it is his search for a home.”
Stegner’s nature writing made him an environmental icon, though political extremes made him uncomfortable. In the 1960s, he found himself at odds with the methods used in campus protests against the Vietnam War. He must have been mortified when Abbey, a former student, celebrated “monkey wrenching,” the sabotage of construction equipment and other tools used to reshape the Western landscape. The Washington Examiner described Stegner as “not exactly a conservative, but rather an old-fashioned — now-out-of-fashion — liberal,” one who valued mutual respect and cooperation.
Stegner retired early from academia in 1971, fed up with counterculture, postmodernist colleagues and the new literary establishment. He even moved his papers from Stanford to the University of Utah. But he kept writing. “Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs” — or “Bluebird” — is a collection of 16 essays and letters to his late mother and a former student. It also offers a loosely chronological look into Stegner’s life and work, divided into three sections: personal, habitat and witnesses. Mostly, it reads as a look back on a lifelong relationship with the West.
A sunset walk takes me to a modest bungalow behind a rickety picket fence, with worn white siding, green trim and one gable above a broad porch. It looks much like the old black and white photo I saw in “Wallace Stegner’s Salt Lake City,” by Robert C. Steensma. The same unkempt cottonwood tree leans over a roof lined with the same thin asphalt shingles. I can almost picture Stegner as a teenage boy, sitting on the steps with a book in his lap or eyeballing the wilds of Liberty Park on the other side of Seventh East on an evening much like this. Just having a home must have been a welcome respite.
Stegner was 12 years old when his family landed here after a childhood of “constant motion,” he writes in “Finding the Place: A Migrant Childhood,” the opening essay of “Bluebird,” like “images on a broken film flapping through the projector.” He’d bounced from remote Saskatchewan to a North Dakota farm, the woods around Seattle and the suburbs of Great Falls, Montana. It wasn’t easy to put down roots after such a frenetic run. The Stegners would never be a typical “family with an attic and a growing accumulation of memorabilia and worn-out life gear and the artifacts of memory,” he writes, but they “began very soon to feel at home.”
Stegner never left the West behind, at least not in his writing. Over and over, he grappled with the ideas of home, what it means to be from a place, and the West in particular.
Salt Lake City was “an easy town to know,” Stegner would write in 1950 for “Tomorrow” magazine. “You can see it all.” The nearby foothills offered an aerial perspective, while the grid made navigation simple. By high school, he’d hang out at the main library on South Temple and State streets, the Deseret Gymnasium next to the Hotel Utah or the old Bonneville Baseball Park at Ninth South and Main. Sometimes he’d venture further afield, catching railroad freights into Lamb’s Canyon, backpacking in the High Uintas or staying in his family’s cabin at Fish Lake.
The young writer always excelled in school. He graduated from East High at age 16 and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Utah in 1930. He left to accept a teaching fellowship at the University of Iowa, which was pioneering a new approach to literary training that would become the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. There, he found that he hated the weather and missed his adopted home. “Homesickness is a great teacher,” he writes. “It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from arid lands, and liked where I came from.”
He started dating an Iowa girl, an undergrad who worked in the library, named Mary Stuart Page. They married in 1934. Stegner’s mother and brother had died, but when he graduated with a doctorate the next year, he moved with his wife back to Salt Lake City. He taught classes at the U. and won a contest for an early novelette in 1937, around the time their son, Stuart Page Stegner, was born. But success soon confronted him with another difficult decision, considering a full-time offer to teach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “If contentment were the only basis for choice, we might have chosen to stay (in Utah),” he writes, “but I had my father’s restless blood in me, and the habit of moving.”
Stegner’s father died two years later, severing the author’s last living tie to Utah.
A ‘geography of hope’
My sea-level lungs are searing as I trudge toward the top of Little Cottonwood Canyon. My shoes are caked in dust. I smile at purple lupines clinging to the canyon walls. Finally, I find a rock where I can sit and watch turquoise ripples across Cecret Lake. The air starts to feel crisp, even delightful. It’s not the paradise Stegner describes in “Crossing Into Eden” — hidden in the High Uintas — but it does make me feel closer. I pull “Bluebird” from my bag and start reading.
By the time Stegner accepted a tenured position at Stanford in 1945, he was an acclaimed author, about to publish his seventh book. He had taught at Harvard and the renowned Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, where he now kept a cabin. In Palo Alto, he founded the nation’s second creative writing program and a prestigious fellowship for budding writers. Over the next 26 years, he’d mentor renowned fiction writers like Thomas McGuane and Raymond Carver, and poets like Robert Haas. Abbey called Stegner “the only living American writer worthy of the Nobel,” adding to three Guggenheim Fellowships and a litany of other honors.
But Stegner never left the West behind, at least not in his writing. Over and over, he grappled with the ideas of home, what it means to be from a place, and the West in particular. In “Living Dry,” he writes that his West spans “a dry core of eight public-lands states — Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming” — that should feel familiar to Deseret readers. California is “west of the West,” set apart by its mega-economy, coastal climate and a culture less concerned with space.
People of the interior West, Stegner believed, are shaped by the endless struggle between infinite space and finite resources, particularly water. He didn’t see this as a curse, as he lays out in “Thoughts in a Dry Land”: “It is aridity that gives the air its special dry clarity; aridity that puts brilliance in the light and polishes and enlarges the stars; aridity that leads the grasses to evolve as bunches rather than as turf.” It is no wonder that Westerners often leave to seek fortune elsewhere, though Stegner had of course seen the other side of that dream.
Homesickness is a great teacher. It taught me, during an endless rainy fall, that I came from arid lands, and liked where I came from.
Perhaps Stegner would think of Utah as he wandered the foothills above his home or hiked the Vermont backwoods each summer. An advocate for natural spaces and traditional communities, he detested the Bay Area’s growing urbanization and sprawl. “Without any remaining wilderness we are committed (to) the Brave New World of a completely man-controlled environment,” he wrote in 1960, dubbing the West a “geography of hope” in his famous “Wilderness Letter” to Congress. These spaces should be preserved to remind us who we are, he writes, “because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”
All those years later, Stegner still wrestles with his early life. More than anything, he seems to be coming to terms in these pages with an idea that has long eluded him: that home is a place you never really leave. In the book’s introduction, he writes that “whenever I return to the Rocky Mountain states … the smell of distance excites me, the largeness and the clarity take the scales from my eyes, and I respond as unthinkingly as a salmon that swims past a rivermouth and tastes the waters of its birth.”
Stegner died at 84 after a car accident in New Mexico, a year after “Bluebird” was published.
A few blocks from Stegner’s old Salt Lake City home, I sit on my backyard patio and play “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” the 1928 folk song that inspired two of Stegner’s book titles. Over a jaunty acoustic guitar, a man sings of a vagrant’s fantasy land, rich with free stew and soft-boiled eggs, with “lemonade springs where the bluebird sings.” It’s the kind of mirage that might have appealed to Stegner’s father. Nearby, I hear a rooster crowing, crickets chirping and children laughing in the distance. I can understand why Stegner felt at home here.
Like him, I felt pushed out of the Bay Area, now a dense web of traffic jams and robot cafes where few can afford to live. I felt more at peace hours away in the redwoods or along the coast than in the suburb where I was raised. I’d get nostalgic reading about the farm towns and art movements that had disappeared before I was born. There wasn’t much to be homesick about when I left, but I’m still wondering where I’m headed.
Similar perils now confront the Wasatch Front, but people here still seem to have the strong sense of identity that resonated with Stegner. “Bluebird” gives me hope that I too can find a place that feels like home, or find a home I already know. With a little patience. In “The Sense of Place,” my favorite essay in the collection, Stegner writes: “Some are born in their place, some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the one they have been searching for.”
This story appears in the November 2025 issue of Deseret Magazine. Learn more about how to subscribe.