The West

It's the birthday of writer Wallace Stegner (books by this author), born in Lake Mills, Iowa (1909). Wallace's father had what Wallace called "the pioneering itch in his bones," and he moved his family around hoping to strike it rich in a Western boomtown. They moved from North Dakota to Washington state, then Montana, California, Saskatchewan, and finally settled in Salt Lake City, where Stegner got into the University of Utah when he was just 16. He was finishing his dissertation when his brother died suddenly of pneumonia. Not long after, his mother died of cancer, and, finally, his father committed suicide. By the end of the 1930s, Stegner had lost his entire family.

Stegner wanted to write about the American West, but instead of a novel about cowboys and heroic pioneers, a novel "about what happens to the pioneer virtues and the pioneer type of family when the frontiers are gone and the opportunities are all used up." His first big success was The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), loosely based on the experiences of his own family.