Author Guide · Literary Fiction
Books Written by
Wallace Stegner, born in Lake Mills, Iowa, in 1909, spent his childhood being moved around the West by a father who chased one failed scheme after another: North Dakota, a homestead in Saskatchewan, Great Falls, Salt Lake City. He turned that family into The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943). In 1946 he founded the creative writing programme at Stanford, where his students included Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry. In 1960 he wrote the “Wilderness Letter”, later credited with helping to pass the Wilderness Act of 1964. Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972, and The Spectator Bird the National Book Award in 1977. This guide covers his 12 key books, in order, and where to begin.
By Lisanne Swart · 12 key books · 1937–1992 · Updated October 2026
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Quick answer
Wallace Stegner wrote 13 novels and around twenty books of history, essays and stories. The best known are Angle of Repose (1971), which won the Pulitzer Prize, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), The Spectator Bird (1976), which won the National Book Award, and Crossing to Safety (1987). Start with Crossing to Safety; below you will find what each book is about and a path through the rest.
Where to Start with Wallace Stegner
If you want the easiest way in
→ Crossing to Safety (1987) — two couples and fifty years of friendship.
If you want his defining book
→ Angle of Repose (1971) — the 1972 Pulitzer Prize winner.
If you want the West he grew up in
→ The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943) — his own family, barely disguised.
If you want his non-fiction
→ Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954) — John Wesley Powell and the fight over water.
12 Wallace Stegner Books, in Order
Remembering Laughter
His first work of fiction, a short novel set on an Iowa farm, about a farming family and the strict household at its centre. It won the Little, Brown Prize in 1937 and launched his career as a novelist.
Mormon Country
A portrait of the Mormon heartland of Utah and the surrounding desert, written by a non-Mormon who had spent his teenage years in Salt Lake City. It mixes history, landscape and sketches of the people who settled the region.
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
The Mason family — Bo, Elsa and their sons Chester and Bruce — follow Bo from North Dakota to a homestead in Saskatchewan, a town on the Montana border and Salt Lake City as he runs a blind pig, a hotel and finally a bootlegging business. Bo’s restlessness wears down everyone around him. The novel is closely based on Stegner’s own childhood.
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
A history of John Wesley Powell, the one-armed Civil War veteran who led the first expedition down the Green and Colorado rivers through the Grand Canyon in 1869, and of his later argument that the arid West could not be settled like the wet East. It remains one of the standard books on water and land in the American West.
Wolf Willow
Stegner returns to the small town in southern Saskatchewan where he spent part of his childhood (Eastend, where his family home is now a writers’ residence). The book combines memoir, a history of the last plains frontier and fiction, including the long story “Genesis” about a cattle drive in a killing winter.
All the Little Live Things
Joe Allston, a retired literary agent, and his wife Ruth retreat to a house in the California hills, still grieving the death of their son. Their quiet is broken by two neighbours: Jim Peck, a young drifter who preaches drugs and free love, and Marian Catlin, a young woman whose trusting innocence draws him in. It won the Commonwealth Club Gold Medal.
Angle of Repose
Lyman Ward, a retired history professor confined to a wheelchair, sets out in 1970 to write the life of his grandmother Susan Burling Ward, a New York artist who followed her husband Oliver, a mining engineer, to Grass Valley, Leadville, New Almaden, Idaho and Mexico. Her story and his own failing marriage run side by side. Susan’s letters are based on those of the writer Mary Hallock Foote. The Modern Library placed it 82nd on its 1998 list of the best English-language novels of the century.
The Spectator Bird
Joe Allston returns, retired in the hills of northern California, and finds the journal he kept on a trip to Denmark with Ruth in 1954, after their son drowned. Reading it aloud to her brings back their stay with the Countess Astrid Wredel-Krarup in Copenhagen and the family secret they uncovered there.
Recapitulation
A sequel to The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Bruce Mason, now an ageing diplomat, comes back to Salt Lake City for a funeral and spends the days walking through the city of his youth, going over his parents, his brother and the girl he once meant to marry.
Crossing to Safety
Larry Morgan narrates the friendship between him and his wife Sally and another couple, Sid and Charity Lang, from their first meeting in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1937, when the two men are young university teachers. The book is framed by a final visit to the Langs’ summer compound at Battell Pond, Vermont, as Charity is dying of cancer. Its drama comes from illness, careers and Charity’s need to run everyone’s lives, not from affairs or betrayals. It was his last novel.
Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner
His short fiction in one volume, including those from The Women on the Wall (1950) and The City of the Living (1957). Three of his stories won O. Henry Awards.
Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs
His last book published in his lifetime: essays on his childhood, on the myths of the West, on water and public land, and on writers including Norman Maclean, plus a letter to his mother, written long after her death. The title comes from the hobo song “Big Rock Candy Mountain”.
In What Order to Read Wallace Stegner
Only two pairs of books are connected: All the Little Live Things and The Spectator Bird share the narrator Joe Allston, and Recapitulation continues the story of Bruce Mason from The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Read each pair in order; everything else stands alone.
Publication order shows a writer who started with the West of his childhood and moved, in the last two decades, towards old age, marriage and memory. His non-fiction runs alongside the novels and covers the same ground, so Wolf Willow is a natural companion to The Big Rock Candy Mountain.
A reading path
1. Crossing to Safety (1987)
2. Angle of Repose (1971)
3. The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943)
4. Wolf Willow (1962)
5. The Spectator Bird (1976)
Everything Else Wallace Stegner Published
Beyond the 12 key books: 16 more, grouped by kind.
Open a group with the + to see every book in it.
Other novels
6
6 books · 1938–1961
- 1938The Potter’s Housean early short novel
- 1940On a Darkling Plaina veteran on the Saskatchewan prairie
- 1941Fire and Icea campus novel of the 1930s
- 1947Second Growtha New Hampshire village
- 1950The Preacher and the Slavea novel about the labour organiser Joe Hill, reissued in 1969 as Joe Hill
- 1961A Shooting Stara wealthy California woman in crisis
Story collections
2
2 books · 1950–1957
- 1950The Women on the Wallhis first collection
- 1957The City of the Livingstories
Non-fiction
8
8 books · 1936–1988
- 1936Clarence Edward Dutton: An Appraisalhis first book, on the geologist
- 1945One Nationon prejudice in America, with the editors of Look
- 1964The Gathering of Zionthe story of the Mormon Trail
- 1969The Sound of Mountain Wateressays on the West
- 1974The Uneasy Chaira biography of Bernard DeVoto
- 1982One Way to Spell Manessays with a Western bias
- 1987The American West as Living Spacethree lectures
- 1988On the Teaching of Creative Writingtalks on teaching
The years · 1909–1993
Quick facts about Wallace Stegner
- Known for
- Wallace Stegner is known as the “dean of Western writers”: a novelist, historian and conservationist who wrote about the American West as a real place rather than a myth, and who taught a generation of American writers at Stanford.
- 1909
- Born in Lake Mills, Iowa
- 1946
- Founds the Stanford writing programme
- 1960
- The “Wilderness Letter”
- 1971
- Angle of Repose
- 1993
- Dies in Santa Fe, New Mexico
- Born
- 18 February 1909, Lake Mills, Iowa
- Died
- 13 April 1993, Santa Fe, New Mexico, after a car accident on 28 March
- Education
- University of Utah (BA, 1930); University of Iowa (MA 1932, PhD 1935)
- Married
- Mary Stuart Page, in 1934, for 59 years
- Taught
- Harvard, then Stanford, where he founded the creative writing programme in 1946
- Prizes
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (1972); National Book Award (1977)
- Declined
- A National Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992
The red mark is 1971: Angle of Repose, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year.
How Wallace Stegner Writes: The West as Lived Experience
Stegner wrote about the West from the inside. He grew up in the places he describes — the Saskatchewan homestead, the Montana border, Salt Lake City — and many of his novels start from his own life: his father in The Big Rock Candy Mountain, his friendship with another academic couple in Crossing to Safety. He was also a historian, and books such as Beyond the Hundredth Meridian show the same interest in how land, water and dry climate shaped the people who settled there.
His later novels are often told by an older man looking back: Lyman Ward in Angle of Repose, Joe Allston in The Spectator Bird, Larry Morgan in Crossing to Safety. The narrator’s present and the past he is reconstructing run side by side, so the books are as much about memory, marriage and ageing as about what happened.
His method of building fiction on real lives had a cost. In Angle of Repose he used passages from the letters of Mary Hallock Foote with only a brief note at the front of the book, and the question of how much he owed her is still argued over. His influence also runs through his students, from Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey to Larry McMurtry.
Frequently asked questions about Wallace Stegner’s books
How many books has Wallace Stegner written?
More than thirty, including 13 novels. This page covers his 12 key books, from Remembering Laughter (1937) to Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992); the rest are his other novels, two story collections and his other history and essay books, listed further down.
What are Wallace Stegner’s books in order?
Remembering Laughter (1937), Mormon Country (1942), The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), Beyond the Hundredth Meridian (1954), Wolf Willow (1962), All the Little Live Things (1967), Angle of Repose (1971), The Spectator Bird (1976), Recapitulation (1979), Crossing to Safety (1987), Collected Stories (1990) and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992).
Where should I start with Wallace Stegner?
Crossing to Safety (1987), the story of two couples whose friendship begins in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1937 and lasts until one of them is dying. Then read Angle of Repose, his most ambitious novel.
What is Wallace Stegner’s most famous book?
Angle of Repose (1971), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972 and was placed 82nd on the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the best English-language novels of the twentieth century.
What awards did Wallace Stegner win?
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972 for Angle of Repose and the National Book Award for Fiction in 1977 for The Spectator Bird, as well as the Little, Brown Prize for Remembering Laughter (1937), two Guggenheim Fellowships and three O. Henry Awards. In 1992 he declined a National Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts, believing it had become too politicised.
Did Wallace Stegner plagiarise Angle of Repose?
It is disputed. The novel draws on the letters of the writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote, then unpublished, and uses substantial passages from them as the letters of Susan Ward, with only a brief explanation at the start of the book. His defenders say he had the Foote family’s permission; critics, including Philip Fradkin in the Los Angeles Times in 2008 and Sands Hall in 2022, argue that he obtained it by saying he would not quote her directly. Foote’s letters were published in 1972 as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.
Do I need to read Stegner’s books in order?
No, with two exceptions: The Spectator Bird follows Joe Allston from All the Little Live Things, and Recapitulation is a sequel to The Big Rock Candy Mountain. All the other books stand alone.
Has Angle of Repose been adapted?
Yes, as an opera. Andrew Imbrie composed Angle of Repose to a libretto by Oakley Hall, and San Francisco Opera gave the premiere in 1976. None of his novels has been made into a feature film.
What is the Wilderness Letter?
A letter Stegner wrote in 1960 to David Pesonen, arguing that wild country is worth keeping even for people who never visit it. It ends with the phrase “the geography of hope” and is credited with helping the passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964.
When did Wallace Stegner die?
On 13 April 1993 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, of injuries from a car accident there on 28 March. He was 84.
Footnotes
- Wallace Stegner — Wikipedia
- Angle of Repose — Wikipedia
- Crossing to Safety — Wikipedia
- The Big Rock Candy Mountain (novel) — Wikipedia
- History of the Stanford Creative Writing Program — Stanford University
- Wilderness Letter introduction — Stanford University
Bibliography last verified 9 October 2026. Where sources give different first-publication years, this page uses the year in library catalogues or the publisher’s own record.
This list was not put together by a machine.
The notes are all mine,
and the books are all his.
Lisanne x
Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021.
See more on her personal bookshelf.
“We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”
— Wallace Stegner, “Wilderness Letter” (1960)
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