This collection shows that Wallace Stegner’s work, however flawed, remains a useful tool for assessing the past, present, and future of the American West.

Mark Fiege is a professor of history and Wallace Stegner Chair in Western American Studies at Montana State University. He is the author of The Republic of Nature: An Environmental History of the United States. Michael J. Lansing is a professor of history at Augsburg University. He is the author of Insurgent Democracy: The Nonpartisan League in North American Politics. Leisl Carr Childers is an associate professor of history at Colorado State University. She is the author of The Size of the Risk: Histories of Multiple Use in the Great Basin.
 

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Wallace Stegner in His Time and in Ours
Mark Fiege, Michael J. Lansing, and Leisl Carr Childers
Openings
1. Wallace Stegner’s Unsettled Country: Ruin, Realism, and Possibility in the American West
Mark Fiege
Ruin
2. The American West as Exploited Space: From One Nation to Poston
Alexandra Hernandez
3. Creation as Erasure: Wallace Stegner and the Making and Unmaking of Regions
Michael J. Lansing
4. Exploits against the Effete: Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto, Men of Western Letters
Flannery Burke
5. Returning to the Best Idea We Ever Had
Michael Childers
Realism
6. The Legacies of Wallace Stegner and the Stegner Fellowships in a Changing American West
Nancy S. Cook
7. Sludge in the Cup: Wallace Stegner’s Philosophical Legacy and the Hard Job Ahead
Michael A. Brown
8. Hope in Public Lands: A Conversation
Leisl Carr Childers and Adam M. Sowards
Possibility
9. The Education of Wallace Stegner
Melody Graulich
10. Revisiting “The Marks of Human Passage”: Lessons from the Dinosaur and Bears Ears National Monument Controversies
Robert B. Keiter
11. The Geography of Hope in an Age of Uncertainty
Paul Formisano
12. The American West as Unlivable Space: Hope, Despair, and Adaptation in an Era of Climate Chaos
Robert M. Wilson
Epilogue: Richer for This Sorrow
Mark Fiege, Michael J. Lansing, and Leisl Carr Childers
Contributors
Index