Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) grew up on the border of Montana and the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, and his writing was deeply shaped by the life and landscape of the mountain West. His first novel, Remembering Laughter, was published in 1937 when he was 28, and he continued writing steadily for more than 50 years, while teaching writing at a succession of American universities, including Harvard and Stanford, where he founded the graduate writing fellowship that bears his name. At Stanford, he served as a mentor to a generation of American writers. His students included Tillie...