Willa, Wallace, and William

Willa, Wallace, and William:  three of my absolutely favorite authors: Cather, Stegner, and Maxwell.  Cather I knew early on, in college. Then I learned about Stegner when it turned out he was a close friend of one of my professors.  Maxwell came a bit later ... when I was working in book publishing and colleagues spoke of his excellence.

Willa was a good generation older than the other two, 1873-1947.  Wallace and William were only a year apart.  Wallace was born in 1909 and died as a result of an automobile accident in Santa Fe in 1993 at the time I was living there.  William was born in '08 and died in 2000.  But they all dealt with western or mid-western themes.

Rather than repeat much of what you can find on-line, I prefer to simply recommend though, yes, I will add a few comments about each.

Wallace Stegner's childhood was spent in Montana, Utah, and Sasketchewan--written up in his autobiography, Wolf Willow (1962) (subtitled A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier).  He eventually settled in Los Altos Hills when he began Stanford's creative writing program which included such luminaries as Wendell Barry, Ken Kesey, and Larry McMurtry.  He won a Pulitzer Prize for his novel, Angle of Repose (1971), and a National Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976).

Among my favorites is his semi-autobiographical novel, Crossing to Safety (1987), which describes the friendship he and his wife had with another couple.  Though the names and places are changed, the other couple lived in Claremont, California.  I know that because Stegner's friend in the book--the husband--was one of my Humanities professors there.  I well remember when a classmate and I ran into him on campus one day in the late '50s and he began telling us about this extraordinary friend named Wallace Stegner who was turning out some superb writing.  He seemed quite in awe of Stegner's abilities plus the great honesty of the man.  Novelist, short story writer, environmentalist, historian, teacher.

Somewhere I read that in writing Crossing to Safety, Stegner wanted (and I may be quoting myself here in some notes I took) "to write something about a decent human being living an ordinary life, not having to resort to a writer's attention-getters of violence, death, greed."  As a long-time reader, "Bravo" is all I can say.

Then, too, Stegner is said to have made the comment:  "The lessons of life amount not to wisdom but to scar tissue and callus."  Life was not always easy for him.  But, as with writing, he once said that the harder something was to write, the easier it was to read.

As for Willa Cather, she and I share a love of the Southwest, the colors, the wide distance, the blue skies and clean air.  One of her better known titles is Death Comes for the Archbishop about Father Latour who was, in real life, Jean-Baptiste Lamy, a French Roman Catholic prelate who served as the first archbishop of Santa Fe.  He built the cathedral in the center of town ... as well as a small chapel out in the Tesuque hills where he would go on retreats.  The chapel still stands on property now owned by The Bishop's Lodge--a resort hotel where I worked briefly during college summers. Among her other great works are My Antonia, The Professor's House (with beautiful descriptions of the Southwest's mesa country), The Song of the Lark, and O Pioneers!.

Archbishop Lamy's small chapel in the hills outside Santa Fe

The chapel's interior

Archbishop Lamy.  Willa Cather gives him the name of Archbishop Latour.

Then, there is William Maxwell, a consummate writer.  No unnecessary words, nothing contrived.  I believe more than one of his works centers around the sudden death of his mother from the 1918 Spanish flu when he was a lad ... and the impact that event had on him and his father.  As in his work, The Chateau, about a young American couple in France, he likes to take experiences from his life and turn them into fiction.  And speaking of fiction, he is said to have worked with some of "the literary lions" since he was a fiction editor at The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. Among his works are They Came Like Swallows and Time Will Darken It.