Wallace Stegner and the American West, by Philip L. Fradkin, $27.50. Anyone who has read the novels of Wallace Stegner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Angle of Repose,” knows a great deal about the author’s personal life. Stegner, who grew up in Canada and Salt Lake City, fictionalized his family over and over again in his writings.
But there is a great deal about Stegner, who died in 1993, that the reading public doesn’t know, despite two biographies. “Wallace Stegner and the American West” adds new information about the author’s personal life.
That includes a story about a young woman he was in love with before he met his wife, Mary, and a visit he may have had with her long after he was married. Author Philip L. Fradkin also discusses Mary’s many illnesses and speculates that she was a hypochondriac.
This biography emphasizes Stegner’s contributions to the West. Stegner was a prominent environmentalist back when such people were known as conservationists. Stegner’s “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” the biography of John Wesley Powell, was one of the seminal books in raising environmental awareness.
Stegner disagreed with the Sierra Club’s decision to trade off preservation of Dinosaur National Park by sacrificing Glen Canyon. David Brower, head of the Sierra Club, later admitted he’d never seen Glen Canyon and regretted the bargain with the devil.
Fradkin goes into detail about Stegner’s controversial use of the writings of Mary Hallock Foote in “Angle of Repose.”
Stegner did not credit the 19th century writer-artist as the source of large sections of text that he lifted directly from Foote. He said later that the family didn’t want the acknowledgment, but others accused Stegner of plagiarism, and several family members objected to the way Foote’s story was sensationalized. Fradkin’s conclusion is Stegner should have either given his source or explained why he didn’t, and he should have insisted the family read the manuscript before it was published.
As a creative writing teacher at Stanford, Stegner made a second contribution to American literature by instructing and encouraging many students who became award-winning. They include Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey and Evan Connell. Stegner himself won most of the literature prizes out there. In 1993, while he was in Santa Fe to receive an award from the Mountain & Plains Booksellers Association in Santa Fe, Stegner was killed in a traffic accident.
Jewish Denver 1859-1940, by Jeanne E. Abrams, $19.99. Flip through the pages of “Jewish Denver 1859-1940,” and you’ll see the remarkable contribution Jews have made to the city and state.
Fred Salomon arrived in 1859 and established the first mercantile store. Other Jewish merchants included David May, who founded the May Co., in Leadville; Wolfe Londoner, was a grocer and Denver mayor; and philanthropist Leopold Guldman operated the Golden Eagle store. More recently, Jack and Hannah Levy owned Fashion Bar, and Meyer Neusteter founded the store bearing his name that was Denver’s most fashionable women’s specialty store for more than 50 years.
Jews came to Denver for the same reasons that everybody else did — to find a better life for their families. But because so many Jews had been employed in unhealthy industrial jobs in big cities where tuberculosis was rampant, they also came for health reasons. In 1903, tuberculosis sufferers formed the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society, whose extensive medical facility in West Denver attracted patients and Jewish doctors alike.
In “Jewish Denver,” Jeanne E. Abrams shows the extent to which Jews were part of the fabric of Denver and contributed to the city. There are portraits of prominent Jews and their establishments, as well as pictures of Jews participating in daily life.
As a picture book, “Jewish Denver” has little text, and most of the information is in captions. Still, those captions contain names, such as Frumess, Kortz, Kauvar and Hirschfeld, Pencol Drug, Dave Cook’s Sporting Goods, Saliman’s Restaurant and Harry Hoffman’s liquor store, familiar to all Denverites of a certain age.
The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion, by Kathleen Cain, $17. The cottonwood just might be the most beloved, as well as the most reviled, tree in the American West. Early travelers wrote of resting under lone cottonwoods, treaties were negotiated under the “council trees” and woodcarvers sought the tree’s roots to make religious figures. Still, the “trash” trees are big and ungainly, and their cotton is a nuisance.
“The Cottonwood Tree: An American Champion” is part history, part science and part environment, and it tells you more than you ever wanted to know about one of the West’s most enduring pioneers.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes regularly about regional nonfiction.
