Writer Wallace Stegner Topic Of Documentary On Ksps

Wallace Stegner, who died in 1993, was a writer of the American West who scorned the triumphal narrative of the lean hero riding into the wilderness and bringing civilization with him.

The characters in Stegner’s novels “The Big Rock Candy Mountain” and “Angle of Repose,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972, were often weak, tragic figures driven by flawed dreams for whom the conquest of the Western lands resulted in disaster.

“Wally poked a hole in the myth of the West,” said the actor Robert Redford, a friend of Stegner, who is the executive producer and narrator of “Wallace Stegner: A Writer’s Life,” an hourlong documentary to be seen tonight on KSPS-7 at 9 p.m.

“For Wally, the West was developed by a series of raids,” said Redford, who has been an activist in conservation causes for 30 years.

Stegner’s writing has been undergoing a revival of sorts in recent years.

Viking Penguin has reprinted 12 Stegner titles, and last year he was the subject of a biography, “Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work,” by Jackson J. Benson (Viking).

The new documentary, produced by Stephen Fisher in the last four years of the writer’s life, was partly financed by Redford.

“Almost alone among major American writers of our time,” Benson wrote in his biography, Stegner realized that the American “dream has not only twisted our lives and corroded our values, it has despoiled the very land that has given us such hope.”

In many ways, Stegner’s writing prefigured the thinking of so-called new historians like Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who see the region in quite different terms from the historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s vision of the land of unlimited opportunity.

“Mr. Stegner was willing to take tragedy into the picture,” said Limerick, who knew him. “The view of Western history as a simple, linear story, in which Americans go west as leaders - he refused that happy marketing route. He looked at failure,” Limerick said. “He showed how toxic dreams could be.”