Writer Fradkin to Talk on Stegner and American West

Nature, culture, and enlightenment come together as Philip Fradkin, award-winning author and long time environmental writer, shares his biographical insight of author Wallace Stegner at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday, February 17 in Temescal Gateway Park, at the corner of Sunset and Temescal Canyon Road. Fradkin will discuss and sign his 2008 biography ‘Wallace Stegner and the American West’ (University of California Press). In his talk, hosted by the Culture in the Canyon Chautauqua series, Fradkin explores Stegner’s life as an influential environmental writer,from his hardscrabble youth to his positions as head of the Stanford Creative Writing Program.   Stegner is best known for the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘Angle of Repose’ and the National Book Award-winning ‘The Spectator Bird.’ However, he ‘was a premier chronicler of the 20th century Western American experience and landscape,’ Fradkin says.   ’I can’t think of anyone in the American West who has contributed on so many levels,’ Fradkin told the Palisadian-Post. ‘There are three aspects. As a writer of fiction and nonfiction, as a teacher of writing, and as a conservation activist.’   As a teacher of writing, Stegner influenced a number of writers, including Kentucky farmer, activist, ecologist and writer Wendell Berry, novelists Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey, and nature writer Edward Abbey, Fradkin says. ‘Some went on to do really great things, some who didn’t go on to do anything at all, but wrote incredible letters to Stegner.’   Stegner was a conservation activist, Fradkin says. In 1962, he founded the Committee For Green Foothills, (equivalent to the Friends of the Santa Monica Mountains), which launched a campaign to create open space above Palo Alto and in the foothills. ‘He did a lot on both the local and national level. He was the special aide to Secretary of the Interior Steward Udall, chairman of the National Parks Advisory Committee and served on the board of directors of the Sierra Club.’   Two previous Stegner biographies were written by professors of literature and dealt mainly with him as a literary figure, Fradkin says. ‘I was pleased to work with the man and the physical landscapes he inhabited; someone who was not perfect, but who had a code of behavior that he stubbornly adhered to.’   Although Fradkin wrote his biography 15 years after Stegner had died in 1993, he meet him briefly in 1981. ‘I was the Western editor of Audubon Magazine, and had started writing books, the first one being ‘A River No More,’ about the Colorado River. I was working on a book about the Sagebrush Rebellion’a movement which pitted Western state ranchers and miners, who wanted to acquire public land in the West, against the federal government’s open space protections.   ’I had wanted to talk to him and I wrote him a letter, although I had purposely stayed away from him until that time because I didn’t want to be overly influenced by any one person. I got a postcard back, saying that he was glad that we were going to meet and that he was reviewing my Colorado River book. It was the first validation I had received on becoming a writer.’   Fradkin, a former Los Angeles Times newspaper journalist (1964-75), started the paper’s first environment column. He recalls a story he wrote for the Sunday Times that suggested, ‘making something of value of all the land purchases in the Santa Monica Mountains.’ In 1978, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area was established. The program and parking are free.