FEATURED AUTHOR: Wallace Stegner

DATE: Saturday, May 17, 2025

TIME: 3pm - 5pm

COST: $35

Wallace Stegner was an author, professor, activist and historian. He is known as “the Dean of western writers.” Stegner grew up in Iowa, Utah, and Montana. He was an advocate of the land throughout his life, fighting against the Green River Dam’s construction in the 1950’s and his “Wilderness Letter” also helped to introduce The National Wilderness Preservation System.

Stegner’s most famous novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972. Environmentalism and recognizing the beauty of wild lands is an overarching theme in Stegner’s work. While his legacy is Western, his fiction has a wide geographical range. Stegner’s writing is extremely relevant today, and the beauty of the West’s natural landscapes are especially in danger in the face of climate change and efforts to desecrate them through oil drilling and development. 

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clean air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.” Stegner, “Wilderness Letter,” 1960

This is a 90 - 120 minute program, recorded live for future broadcast over various podcasts and YouTube channels. Must be 21 years and older to attend.

Click here to see additional dates.