courtesy SF Public Library

On February 18, 2009, we celebrate the centennial of Wallace Stegner’s birth. Sixteen years after his death, his voice is still vivid, eloquent, and relevant. When Stephen Harper, the conservative prime minister of Canada, went looking for inspirational and pithy descriptions of the Canadian prairie to enliven a speech, he used Stegner’s words. Newly-elected Senator Mark Udall from Colorado quoted only two people in his address to the Democratic convention in August: his Dad, the legendary Arizona Congressman Mo Udall, and Wallace Stegner.

Writer and historian, teacher and environmental activist, Stegner reveled in the strength of the land but saw human impacts with a clear eye. He created and for 25 years directed the creative writing program at Stanford University. He won a Pulitzer Prize (for Angle of Repose) and a National Book Award (for The Spectator Bird). He also worked as special advisor to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in the Kennedy administration, and served as wise elder to the conservation community for a generation. He coined the phrase “the geography of hope” to define wild country, and those four words became his most widely quoted.

Stegner always saw the complexities in our struggles to make a home on this wild continent. In Wolf Willow, he wrote: “Anyone who has lived on a frontier knows the inescapable ambivalence of the old-fashioned American conscience, for he has first renewed himself in Eden and then set about converting it into the lamentable modern world.”

This was a theme Stegner returned to repeatedly. Near the end of his life, he sat down to make notes in longhand to guide a filmmaker working on a biographical documentary. Under the heading “What I learned,” Stegner wrote in reference to the West:

—respect for the land and its history

—contrition for my part in spoiling it

—some sense of responsibility, as a citizen at last of the whole country, for trying to repair and preserve

—suspicion and dislike for those who in continuing and inexcusable ignorance, or in disregard for land ethics and human ethics, go on raping the West (and also the world at large) in cycles of boom and bust, growing desertification, bad sociology, bad human living.

Citizen. Stegner is the model citizen/writer for us all. Not just a novelist living in isolation in a literary world. Not just an outraged environmentalist ranting from the sidelines of society. But a fully engaged citizen, sensitive to the lives and tragedies of his neighbors, rooted in place and community. I think this remarkable sense of connectedness with both place and people is why we still revere the man, why so many of us return to his writing for inspiration and guidance.

Wallace Stegner was a decent, gentlemanly, steady, generous man who believed in community and cooperation. He shared a suite of values with our new president, Barack Obama—a stunning combination of civic engagement and citizenship, of scholarship and thoughtfulness.

In his inauguration speech, President Obama asked us to step up to our responsibilities as citizens. Stegner mirrors those values in his essay written for the original “This I Believe” series created by Edward R. Murrow in the Fifties. After the thrill and seriousness of the Obama inaugural, it seems appropriate to listen as Stegner muses about his own beliefs:

—I do not see how we can evade the obligation to take full responsibility for what we individually do…I believe in conscience.

— …the Chinese and Indian know as well as I do what kindness is, what generosity is, what fortitude is. They can define justice quite as accurately. It is only when they and I are blinded by tribal and denominational narrowness that we insist upon our differences and can recognize goodness only in the robes of our own crowd.

—I am terribly glad to be alive; and when I have wit enough to think about it, terribly proud to be a man and an American, with all the rights and privileges that those words connote; and most of all I am humble before the responsibilities that are also mine. For no right comes without a responsibility, and being born luckier that most of the world’s millions, I am more obligated.

When Wallace Stegner died in 1993, I looked around for a wise elder to replace him, a faraway mentor with a century’s worth of perspective running from the Frontier to the Internet to imagine looking over my shoulder as I write, to remind me of the crucial fundamental truths.

There is no one to replace him.