Wallace Stegner

Stegner grew up rootless across Iowa, North Dakota, Washington, and Saskatchewan behind a restless, failed-schemer father, an upbringing he later mined directly for his fiction's preoccupation with land, inheritance, and the mythology of the frontier.

He founded and ran Stanford's creative writing program for a quarter century, mentoring a generation of writers including Larry McMurtry and Robert Stone while writing his own fiction on the side. Angle of Repose, built loosely on the real letters of pioneer writer Mary Hallock Foote, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, though its unacknowledged use of her actual words later drew controversy.

A committed conservationist, he helped draft the Wilderness Act's founding language. He died in 1993 from injuries sustained in a car accident.