Point Reyes Books

 

Carl D. Brant: The firm of Brandt & Brandt, now Brandt & Hochman, is one of the oldest literary agencies in New York City and has represented Wallace Stegner and the Stegner Estate since 1937. First Bernice Baumgarten of the firm, a legendary agent who was married to the novelist James Gould Cozzens, then Carl’s father, mother, and lastly Carl represented Stegner.

 

Sharon Butala: This award-winning Canadian author, whose fifteen books center on life on the Saskatchewan prairie, has lived for the last thirty years on a ranch near Eastend, where Wallace Stegner spent his formative years. She and her husband Peter donated 13,100 acres of their ranch to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Butala was instrumental in preserving Stegner‘s Eastend home as a retreat for writers and artists.

 

John Daniel: A Stegner Fellow, lecturer at Stanford, and tenant of the Stegners in the mid-1980s, Daniel got to know the Stegner's on a personal basis. He is the author of eight books of memoir, personal essays, and poetry. Daniel’s most recent book is Rogue River Journal, for which he won a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.

 

Mark Dowie: The award-winning investigative journalist, former editor and publisher of Mother Jones magazine, and author of seven books, including Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century, teaches at the University of California Graduate School of Journalism and has been active in local environmental issues in West Marin.

 

Philip L. Fradkin: The author of eleven books on the American West, including A River No More: The Colorado River and the West, which Stegner praised as “looking illusion in the eye until it blinks," and a biography Wallace Stegner and the American West.

 

Merrill Joan Gerber: The author of seven novels, one of which won the Pushcart Press Editor’s Book Award, as well as five volumes of short stories and three books of nonfiction. Her most recent novel is The Victory Gardens of Brooklyn. Gerber has also contributed to numerous literary journals and teaches writing at the California Institute of Technology. She was a Stegner Fellow.

 

Harold Gilliam: Formerly environmentalist columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Gilliam was a student of Stegner’s at Stanford University and followed him to Washington, D.C., where he also worked for Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall. He is the author of many books, among them Island in Time about the Point Reyes Peninsula.

 

Melody Graulich: A professor of English and American studies at Utah State University, Graulich is the editor of the journal Western American Literature. She teaches about Stegner from the state where Stegner lived as a young man, and has written a number of essays on his works. Graulich is currently editing a volume of letters of Mary Hallock Foote, on whose life and letters Stegner based Angle of Repose.

 

Robert Hass: Poet laureate of the United States, twice winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, and winner of the MacArthur Award, Hass is a professor of English at the University of California at Berkeley and author of numerous poetry books, editor of collections, and translator of the poetry of Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz. Hass was acquainted with Stegner while a graduate student at Stanford in the Creative Writing Program.

 

Jonathan Kirsch: The son of longtime Los Angeles Times book critic Robert Kirsch, who Stegner praised for his astute criticism, Kirsch is the author of ten nonfiction books and an attorney specializing in publishing law and intellectual property rights. He reviews books and for years specialized in reviewing books on the American West.

 

William Kittredge: Raised on a ranch where he worked until the age of thirty-five, Kittredge was a Stegner Fellow and Regents Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Montana. After writing collections of essays, short stories, and a memoir. he published his first novel The Willow Field in 2006. The San Francisco Chronicle referred to Kittredge as “one of the American West’s most respected fiction writers.”

 

Barry Lopez: The essayist and author of works of fiction and nonfiction has written about the relationship between physical landscape and human culture in such books as Arctic Dreams, which won a National Book Award, and more recently on themes of resistance and reconciliation. Like Wallace Stegner and William Kittredge, Lopez has taught at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

 

Lynn Stegner: The daughter-in-law of Mary and Wallace Stegner has written four novels, including the critically acclaimed Because a Fire Was in My Head. She edited and wrote the forward to Wallace Stegner: On Teaching and Writing Fiction. Stegner is the director of the Santa Fe Writer’s Workshop.

 

Page Stegner: The only child of Mary and Wallace Stegner is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction and editor of a number of collections. His most recent book is The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner published by Shoemaker & Hoard. He headed the Creative Writing Program at the University of California at Santa Cruz.