Stegner certainly had the writerly credentials — Ph.D, a teaching stint at Harvard, short stories published in all the right journals read by all the right people. But he chose to make the cultural elite come to him.
And he grounded himself, spending nearly half his life in the Palo Alto foothills above Stanford.
On his 100th birthday, it’s worth remembering another lesson of his life — to choose authenticity over artifice. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, paraphrasing the writer Wendell Berry, “you don’t know who you are.”
He knew — the where and the who.
Timothy Egan, "Stegner’s Complaint," Timothy Egan Blog - NYTimes.com, 18 Feb 2009, egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/18/.
