The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto

by Wallace Stegner

Overview

Bernard DeVoto was a wild intellectual from the Rocky Mountains, a rebel, iconoclast, and idealist who fled his stifling small town for the intellectual freedom and community of Harvard. While he settled eastward in his career as a novelist, professor, editor, historian, and critic, he continued to love, to a point of passion, western openness, freedom, and society.

National Book Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning author and fellow westerner Wallace Stegner's life intersected with Devoto's many times, first by accident and later by friendship and example. They were kindred spirits, both westerners by birth, upbringing, and demeanor, novelists by vocation, teachers by necessity, and historians and conservationists by a sheer compulsion inspired by the region that shaped them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101911693
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/18/2015
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	9 MB

About the Author

 Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.

Date of Birth:

February 18, 1909

Date of Death:

April 13, 1993

Place of Birth:

Lake Mills, Iowa

Place of Death:

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Education:

B.A., University of Utah, 1930; attended University of California, 1932-33; Ph. D., State University of Iowa, 1935

Editorial Reviews

Novelist Stegner tends to identify with writers like himself: westerners who try to forge a literary identity far from the East Coast establishment. Like Walter Clark (see above), Bernard DeVoto-novelist, critic, historian, editor-was an outsider both in his native Utah (where he was baptized a Catholic) and in the East, despite his Harvard education. When Stegner's biography first appeared in 1974, Kirkus didn't appreciate how much Stegner personally seems to have invested in his life of a writer we thought unworthy of his superior talents. "A thoroughly agreeable book about a thoroughly disagreeable" man Kirkus put it: "an exhaustive biography of such a minor literary personality." But Stegner's "valentine" to his friend also captures the times in which he thrived-it's a remarkable look at the literary politics of an era, and a man who found himself at its red-hot center. We wondered "why Stegner cares so much," but in retrospect, the answer seems clearer.

Kirkus Reviews

"A battlefield panorama of the literary world from 1920 to 1955."—New York Times Book Review

New York Times Book Review

"One of the best-written biographies . . . It consistently goes beyond the limits of its subject to illuminate what it meant to be a writer in the America of the '30s, '40s, and '50s."—Time

Time