by Denise DiFulco


“I always have ideas, and I’ll die with a number of uncompleted ideas—and that’s all right, too. At age 73, that’s not a bad life: to still be excited by ideas.”


While researching the papers of his latest subject, Wallace Stegner, author Philip Fradkin ’57 was surprised to come across a file with his own name on it at the University of Utah archives. The two met briefly in the late 1970s when Fradkin, then an editor for Audubon, interviewed the legendary Western writer and conservationist for an article in the magazine. They maintained a correspondence for years afterward.

Inside the folder, Fradkin found some of his own letters along with another written by Stegner—one that Fradkin never knew existed. “I didn’t realize he nominated me for a MacArthur Fellowship, what they call a ‘genius grant,’” Fradkin says. More than a decade after Stegner’s death, Fradkin had received the greatest sort of approbation from the “dean of Western writers”—a man who won both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and a National Book Award.

Fradkin himself is an award-winning journalist, author and environmentalist. Unlike Stegner, who lived almost exclusively throughout the Western U.S. and Canada from his birth in 1909 until his death in 1993, Fradkin was born and raised in the East— Montclair, N.J., to be exact. But his passion for the romantic and rugged terrain has been no less intense. When Fradkin was a teen, his father took him on a trip by train, limousine and bus through the American West and Canadian Rockies that sparked a lifelong love affair with the region. After graduating from Williams and serving two years in the Army, he loaded up his Volkswagen Beetle and headed to California in 1960.

Following stints at small newspapers in central and northern California, Fradkin joined the staff of the Los Angeles Times, where he shared a Pulitzer Prize with the metropolitan staff for its coverage of the Watts racial conflict. He was later named the newspaper’s first environmental writer. He worked briefly as assistant secretary of the California Resources Agency under thenGov. Jerry Brown before joining Audubon magazine as its first Western editor.

Apart from that one interview for Audubon at Stegner’s Palo Alto Hills home, Fradkin admits he avoided crossing paths with his subject thereafter. In large part, it was because Fradkin didn’t want his own writing to be unduly influenced by that of Stegner, who was founder of the Stanford Creative Writing Program.

After Stegner’s death, however, Fradkin received a letter from Stegner’s son Page, who was compiling a volume of selected letters from his father. Unfortunately, Fradkin had lost about a dozen pieces of their correspondence in a 1988 house fire. Many were written while Fradkin was in Utah conducting research for one of his 11 books, Sagebrush Country: Land and the American West, and contained Stegner’s lyrical reminisces of his youth in Salt Lake City.

“I e-mailed [Page] back,” Fradkin says, “and the proverbial light bulb went on—what about a biography of Wallace Stegner?”

Only one posthumous biography had been published previously, in 1996, which Fradkin says was “overly praiseful” due to the involvement of Stegner’s widow, Mary. Page, Fradkin says, “made it clear he did not want another hagiography. He wanted someone who could perceive his father as a whole person.”

Fradkin began to shop the idea around, but publishing houses initially took a pass, telling him repeatedly that literary biographies had limited interest. The book finally sold to Alfred A. Knopf, through an editor Fradkin had pitched the idea to several times. When that editor retired, a fellow Eph, Andrew Miller ’96, shepherded the book through the rest of the process.

The biography Fradkin finally published, Wallace Stegner and the American West (Alfred A. Knopf, 2008; University of California Press, 2009), turned out to be far more than just an overview of a writer’s life, since Stegner’s influence so greatly transcended his published works. Not only did Stegner give voice to the experience of the American West for his generation and those to follow, but he also fought tirelessly to protect the authenticity of that experience through his environmental advocacy. At times, Fradkin says, Stegner’s legacy as a writer and conservationist were one and the same, “especially in his nonfiction, in the sense that it gives a wonderful description of the landscape of the West and the need to preserve it.”

The outcome of the Stegner biography was somewhat ironic, considering how Fradkin views Stegner’s role as a literary figure. “What he did for all writers in the West was legitimize the West as a worthwhile subject in the eyes of editors, who, for the most part, have been raised and schooled in the East and have never left the narrow edge of the Atlantic Ocean.”