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Neither the Mormons nor the Wobblies fit comfortably in narratives of Western development dominated by cowboys, railroad men, ranchers and other boomer archetypes. They are outliers in that heroic story, even as they seem to occupy opposite sides of the American political ledger. The I.W.W., to the extent that it is remembered at all, belongs to the annals of the homegrown left, while the Mormon Church, a far more enduring institution, has become nearly synonymous with American conservatism.

But to Stegner, in the years between the end of the Depression and the first peak of the Cold War, the gulf didnt seem so wide. A word that recurs in the pages of Mormon Country dealing with the social organization of Mormon towns and wards is solidarity, which is also the theme of the I.W.W. anthem and a keyword in the lexicon of labor radicalism. That shared value of communal participation and collective identity is what defines the Wobblies and the Latter-day Saints as dissident formations in the landscape of the West.

Its Stegners ability to perceive that common thread, and to hear the counter-individualist strains in other Western voices, that makes him hard to classify. His nonfiction writing on the West including the memoir Wolf Willow, the essay collection The Sound of Mountain Water and a biography of the Utah-bred historian and critic Bernard DeVoto bespeaks a passionate, lifelong environmentalism, a legacy that continues in the work of at least two of his erstwhile students, Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey. But Stegners contempt for the kind of boomer represented by Bo Mason reappeared as intolerance of another kind toward the baby boom hippies whose selfish hedonism soured his mood in the 1960s and after. All the Little Live Things features a counterculture villain who brings intellectual pretension, bad hygiene and free love into the peaceful California valley where Joe and Ruth Allston are trying to tend their garden. Later, in The Spectator Bird, Stegner will indulge Joe in a tirade about the age of infidelity, when casual coupling and wife-swapping and therapeutic prostitution are accepted forms of violence as normal as mugging and murder.

Joes distaste for this age, in which whinnyings and slobberings and outr sexual practices are celebrated in every novel you pick up, reflects Stegners disaffection with the literary culture of the time. As Mark McGurl explains it in The Program Era, his critical history of postwar fiction and the rise of creative writing, Stegner saw his ethic of integrity and group participation (modeled in the writing workshops he taught) displaced by an aesthetic of openness and liberation. Stegner himself became an avatar of the literary establishment. The daily New York Times reviewed Angle of Repose favorably, but the Sunday Book Review ran two columns attacking it, one by William DuBois condemning it as too well made and therefore irredeemably middlebrow, the other by John Leonard, after the novel won a Pulitzer Prize, decrying the jurys preference for a comfortable, tame, toothless and affectionate book over more challenging candidates.

The irony of The New York Times waving the anti-establishment flag is mirrored by Stegners sense of himself a prizewinning author with a Ph.D. in English, a professor at an elite university as an aggrieved outsider. This paradox is integral to his character, and his acute sense of it is one of the reasons hes worth reading now, when we spend so much time mapping the fault lines between privilege and resentment and fighting over who is part of the elite and who is entitled to victim status. He cant be enlisted as a partisan in the culture wars, but he isnt a pacifist either. Hes more like a one-man battlefield, whose dreams of peace the repose and safety promised in those titles express the longings of a tectonically divided civilization.

In an essay called Born a Square, Stegner imagines a young Western writer discovering himself to be at odds with both the dominant literary mores and the background that should provide material. The world he most feels and he feels it even while he repudiates it offers him only frontier heroics or the smugness of middle-class provincialism, while other regional, ethnic and social identities seem to provide richer subject matter to his peers. Why, Stegner wonders, havent Westerners been able to find in their own time, place and tradition the characters, situations, problems, quarrels, threats and injustices out of which literature is made?

This question has been answered, since Stegners death, both in tribute and in opposition to his example. His anti-mythological stance has been picked up, and sometimes turned against him, by writers attuned to histories and identities that his writing left out. In 1996 Elizabeth Cook-Lynn published a collection of essays bluntly titled Why I Cant Read Wallace Stegner, which pointed out the absence in his books of any serious engagement with the Indigenous history of the region. Any half-awake reader will notice that while Indians, Mexicans, African-Americans and Asian immigrants are not entirely missing from his fiction, they are at best marginal presences, sometimes servile, sometimes comical, but more features of the landscape than fully human actors within it.

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Wallace Stegner and the Conflicted Soul of the West - The New York Times