Order of Wallace Stegner Books

Wallace Stegner was an American author considered to be the “Dean of Western Writers”. He wrote numerous books throughout his career including The Big Rock Candy Mountain, the Pulitzer Prize winning Angle of Repose, and the National Book Award winning The Spectator Bird.

Stegner was born in Iowa, but grew up across the United States and Canada. In his life, he lived in twenty different places including eight different US states. Stegner would go on to attend the University of Utah where he graduated in 1930 before heading to the University of Iowa where he earned his Master’s degree and a doctorate. He would also go on to teach at the University of Wisconsin, Harvard University, and Stanford University. At Stanford, he founded the creative writing program and had many famous students during his time.

Publication Order of Brude Mason Books

The Big Rock Candy Mountain	(1943)
Recapitulation	(1979)

Publication Order of American Folkways Books

Mormon Country	(1942)
Blue Ridge Country (By: )	(2007)

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Remembering Laughter	(1937)
The Potter's House	(1938)
On a Darkling Plain	(1940)
Fire and Ice	(1941)
Second Growth	(1947)
Joe Hill: A Biographical Novel	(1950)
A Shooting Star	(1961)
All the Little Live Things	(1967)
Angle of Repose	(1971)
The Spectator Bird	(1976)
Crossing to Safety	(1987)

Publication Order of Collections

The Women on the Wall	(1950)
The City of the Living & Other Stories	(1956)
The Writer's Art	(1972)
The Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner	(1990)

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Beyond the Hundredth Meridian	(1954)
This Is Dinosaur	(1955)
Wolf Willow	(1962)
The Gathering of Zion	(1964)
Teaching the Short Story	(1966)
The Sound of Mountain Water	(1969)
Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil	(1971)
The Uneasy Chair	(1974)
The Writer in America	(1976)
One Way To Spell Man	(1982)
Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History & Literature	(1983)
American Places	(1985)
The American West as Living Space	(1987)
On the Teaching of Creative Writing	(1988)
Wilderness at the Edge	(1991)
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs	(1992)
Marking the Sparrow's Fall	(1998)
On Teaching and Writing Fiction	(2002)
The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner	(2007)
The Selected Letters	(2007)
Wallace Stegner's West	(2008)
The Twilight of Self Reliance	(2008)

Publication Order of Anthologies

50 Great American Short Stories	(1963)
The Faber Book of Contemporary Canadian Short Stories	(1990)
Prose and Poetry of the American West	(1991)

If You Like Wallace Stegner Books, You’ll Love…

• John Updike
• Philip Roth
• Jim Harrison

Angle of Repose is a story about a man named Lyman Ward who is confined to a wheelchair with a crippling bone disease. Ward has lost connection with his son in the counterculture of the 1970s. He decides to start writing the the biography of his grandmother. She was an artist and pioneer who made the journey with her husband across the hardscrabble West. As he works to discover his grandmother’s story, he also starts to examine his own as he probes the shadows of his own existence.

Stegner is also the author of Crossing to Safety. The book is considered one of the great American novels. It tells the story of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, two wives married to two professors during the great depression. The story traces their lives, loves, and aspirations. The story of fairly privileged people in academia shows just how difficult life can be, with equal highs and lows.