The Uneasy Chair

"He was precocious, alert, intelligent, brash, challenging, irreverent, literary, self-conscious, insecure, often ostentatiously crude, sometimes insufferable," Wallace Stegner says of Bernard DeVoto, who, in the words of a childhood acquaintance, was also "the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw." Between the disagreeable boy and the literary lion, a life unfolds, full of comedy and drama, as told in this definitive biography, which brings together two exemplary American men of letters.
 
Born within a dozen years of one another in small towns in Utah, both men were, as Stegner writes, "novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us." From this unique vantage point, Stegner follows DeVoto's path from his beloved but not particularly congenial Utah to the even less congenial Harvard where, galvanized by the disregard of the aesthetes around him, he commenced a career that, over three and a half decades, would embrace nearly every sort of literary enterprise: from modestly successful novels to prize-winning Western histories, from the editorship of the Saturday Review to a famously combative, long-running monthly column in Harper's , "The Easy Chair." A nuanced portrait of a stormy literary life, Stegner's biography of DeVoto is also a window on the tumultuous world of American letters in the twentieth century.

Kirkus 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.

Taking the American frontier both physical and psychological as his subject, Wallace Stegner created a body of work that stretches from prizewinning novels and short stories to historical and political nonfiction. Taking both human experience and natural beauty as his muses, Stegner embodied what he called the western character.