Wallace Stegner
American novelist and writerWikipedia
45
MENTIONS
26
EPISODES
22
PODCASTS
Search complete. 45 mentions across 26 episodes found for "Wallace Stegner".
Sep 22, 2026
Stan ChristensenHOST
What's your best tip for finding good things to read? And do you read fiction and nonfiction? Give us just a quick overview of how you approach reading.
David BrooksGUEST
Yeah, one of my favorite books, which I actually went back and reread this week, is a novel about old friendship by Wallace Stegner, and it's called Crossing to Safety.
Stan ChristensenHOST
It's the two couples up in Madison.
Stan ChristensenHOST
I just love that book.
Pappy GNARRATOR
400 miles of Chihuahuan Desert, canyon, and sky set aside that every Texan, every American, every person who needs to find something bigger than themselves There's a place to go.
Pappy GNARRATOR
Writer Wallace Stegner called the national park system the best ideal America had ever had.
Pappy GNARRATOR
And he wasn't wrong.
Pappy GNARRATOR
Happy 250th, America.
Tad WilliamsGUEST
So there were only three other sets of people living in it with us.
Tad WilliamsGUEST
And one of them was a guy who was a very good writer, who was actually the Wallace Stegner literary chair at Stanford, which was just down the road from us, and had already published two or three novels of his own.
Tad WilliamsGUEST
One of them has been made into at least one big movie, which was The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford with Brad Pitt
DevinHOST
and
Steve StocktonHOST
It's said that he spent more time in the woods of the Sierra than John Muir.
Steve StocktonHOST
He was also a writer, his mentor being Wallace Stegner.
Steve StocktonHOST
This particular season, though, and somewhat inexperienced backcountry helicopter flyer, Randy was grounded due to the weather.
Steve StocktonHOST
He absolutely loathed this and referenced it to as being in purgatory.
Jen Pollock-MichelleGUEST
I'm like, well, who am I reading now and how are they making me want to write? So actually this reader that I was just talking about who was emailing me, we are on a Stegner kick.
Jen Pollock-MichelleGUEST
Wallace Stegner.
Jen Pollock-MichelleGUEST
20th century American author.
Jen Pollock-MichelleGUEST
Gosh, his prose is so beautiful.
Kaiser KuoHOST
So I'm gonna predictably plug another novel.
Kaiser KuoHOST
Actually, I plugged it on the last show, and I mean, I, I, I, the pl- the author, uh, Wallace Stegner, this time it's his novel Angle of Repose, uh, which actually won the Pulitzer in 1972, and I'd somehow never read it, but it turns out to be, actually to tie it to, to today's conversation, kind of about mining, uh, a little bit.
Kaiser KuoHOST
Anyway, there's, um, the, the setup of it is, it's, there's a retired historian guy by the name of Lyman Ward.
Kaiser KuoHOST
Uh, he's confined to a wheelchair, and he sets out to reconstruct the life of his grandmother, who is really larger than life, a woman named Susan Burling Ward, uh, who is a real genteel Eastern, uh, illustrator and fiction writer who follows her engineer husband, who's this really kind of rugged, very, uh, you know, taciturn and, and, and very serious man, to the mining camps of the West in the 1870s and 1880s.
Kaiser KuoHOST
Um, but she never stops kind of, uh, mourning her, the civilized life in the East Coast that she's left behind.
Kaiser KuoHOST
It's just a magnificent book, and Susan Burling Ward, uh, who he's writing about, is just one of the most fully realized characters in American fiction that I have come across.
Kaiser KuoHOST
And I actually made a new friend because of, of Wallace Stegner, a, a, a, a reader named Steven, who's fairly new to Beijing.
Kaiser KuoHOST
He's here in, in a very interesting capacity.
Steve StocktonHOST
It's said that he spent more time in the woods of the Sierra than John Muir.
Steve StocktonHOST
He was also a writer, his mentor being Wallace Stegner.
Steve StocktonHOST
This particular season, though, and somewhat inexperienced backcountry helicopter flyer, Randy was grounded due to the weather.
Steve StocktonHOST
He absolutely loathed this and referenced it to as being in purgatory.
Brian GlaveyHOST
She's joined by her friend, Emer Feeney, who very clearly also has an advanced degree in this subject.
Brian GlaveyHOST
And the two of them are going to talk about the 1987 novel Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner.
Brian GlaveyHOST
Crossing the Safety is not a hangout novel exactly, but it is explicitly organized around the problem of how you might tell the story of your life if it were organized around friendship rather than some other more propulsive kind of plotline.
Brian GlaveyHOST
The novel tells the story of the lifelong friendship of two couples, Larry and Sally, and Sid and Charity, who shape and determine the course of their lives together in ways that are rich, complex, and ambivalent.
Brian GlaveyHOST
It's full of heartache and ambition and love, but one of the things it also tries to do is to draw a kind of artistic lesson from the complex ambiguities of friendship.
Brian GlaveyHOST
What it means to find a life lived with other people meaningful is to figure out a shape or a form or a plotline that can hold it, to invent a genre that didn't exist before.
Brian GlaveyHOST
I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Emer Pond Feeney and Sheila Liming about making friends when you're old enough to know who you are, about the glimmer of Vermont, and about crossing to safety by Wallace Stegner.
Sheila LimingGUEST
Well, so we both live in the greater Burlington, Vermont area, and I moved here in 2020, but I believe we met first online, even though we live in the same city, effectively.
River Horse NakadateGUEST
I'm back in Whitman a bunch, and Thoreau.
River Horse NakadateGUEST
Like, what is over there? Oh, tons of Stegner I'm back into.
Sam CarterHOST
Hmm.
River Horse NakadateGUEST
Wolf Willow, that, his first bio.
Paul AxtonHOST
And then he attended... a kind of prestigious writing program at Stanford University.
Paul AxtonHOST
The Wallace Stegner fellow, and Stegner was there leading the seminars, and I thought it was very interesting.
Paul AxtonHOST
David, have you read Larry McMurtry? Did you ever read his novels? I did not.
Paul AxtonHOST
Or Ken Casey, you know, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
16 more episodes mention Wallace Stegner.
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