Ed and Wally in New York

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Great essay on Wallace Stegner by A.O. Scott in the New York Times got me thinking about Stegner and Abbey again.

Here are a couple of snippets from my book, All the Wild That Remains, about Ed and Wally and the big city…..

When I mentioned the names of these writers in the East, I sometimes got befuddled looks. More than once I had been asked: “Wallace Stevens? Edward Albee?”  No, I would patiently explain. Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey.

It was kind of funny, really. Stegner and Abbey were both so firmly entrenched in the pantheon of writers of the American West that if the region had a literary Mount Rushmore their faces would be chiseled on it. But back east their names, as often as not, elicited puzzlement. When this happened, I would always rush to their defense. Wallace Stegner, I would explain, won the Pulitzer Prize for a novel one year and the National Book Award for another the next, and singlehandedly corrected many of the facile myths about the American West, earning him the role of intellectual godfather, not just of the region but of generations of environmental writers. As for Ed Abbey, I would say, he wrote a novel that sparked an entire environmental movement—have you heard of monkeywrenching or Earth first!?–and another that some consider the closest thing to a modern Walden, a book that many describe as life-changing…..

Both men were understandably unhappy about the career-deflating tag of “regional writer,” but the tags have stuck to some extent. Mimicking the confusion of some of the easterners I’ve talked to, Abbey once jokingly referred to himself as Edward Albee. “Never make the New Yorker’s mistake of taking New York for America,” Stegner warned. Abbey, as usual, was more confrontational about his geographic inferiority complex. He railed against being ignored in print and person. When a friend from New York City suggested that the problem was that Abbey was a big fish in a small pond while he, the New York friend, was a small fish in a big pond, Abbey wrote in his journal: “Perfect. This guy thinks New York is the big pond, and the American West the small one.”