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Home WALLACE STEGNER CENTER High School Teaching Resources

In 1921 Wallace Stegner arrived in Salt Lake City.  He was 12 years old.  He attended East High and the University of Utah.  In “Finding the Place: a Migrant Childhood” Wallace Stegner describes how Salt Lake City became home.

“. . . from February 1909, when I was born on my grandfather’s farm near Lake Mills, Iowa, to September 1930, when I boarded a bus in Salt Lake City to go “back east” to graduate school in Iowa, all the places I knew were western.”

“My father was a boomer, a gambler a rainbow-chaser, as footloose as a tumbleweed in a windstorm.  My mother was always hopefully, hopelessly, trying to nest.”

“But by late June of 1921 we were on the road again, heading south. . . seeing the West, in a Hudson Supersix. . .”

“Though we saw a lot of the West in the years following 1921, we did our wandering from the fixed base of Salt Lake City, or within its boundaries. Between my twelfth and twenty-first years we must have lived in twenty different houses, and we never again became, as we had been in Eastend, a family with an attic. . . “

“What I most wanted, it seems to me now, was to belong to something, and Mormon institutions are made to order for belongers.”

“When she [his mother] did die in November [1932], we buried her in Salt Lake next to my brother, who had died of pneumonia two years earlier, and I went back to Iowa to finish my degree.”

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After leaving Salt Lake city in 1930, Stegner attended the University of Iowa and went on to teach literature at the University of Utah, University of of Wisconsin at Madison, and Harvard.  He directed the creative writing program at Stanford and was on faculty there from 1946 to 1971.  His works include Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Beyond the Hundredth Meridian:  John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, 1953; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); and Spectator Bird, 1977 (National Book Award).

In Recapitulation (1979) he describes his return to Salt Lake City.

“He is walking along Thirteenth East Street on an absolutely perfect morning, a creation morning.  Perhaps there was a shower during the night, but it feels as if prehistoric Lake Bonneville has risen silently in the dark, overflowing its old beach terraces, one by one, flooding the Stansbury, then the Provo, on which this street is laid, then finally the Bonneville; filling the valley to overflowing, stretching a hundred miles westward into the desert. . .”

Stegner and Land, Resources and The Environment

“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 clear 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 own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste.”

-The Wilderness Letter, 1960

High School Teaching Materials


Below are texts by Wallace Stegner with curriculum connections, related Stegner Symposia, and suggestions for further reading or viewing.

The Wilderness Letter
The Wilderness Letter
“Crossing Into Eden” (From Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs)
 
Curriculum Connection
Science: Conservation Biology and Island Biogeography
Political Science: Conservation and Natural Resources
Geography: Public and Private Lands
American History: The Environmental Movement
 
Symposia
Silent Spring at 50: The Legacy of Rachel Carson
Exploring Aldo Leopold’s Legacy
Wilderness: Preserving Nature in a Political World
 
Pairs well with
Wallace Stegner on Environmental Change and Conservation
A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
The Sound of Mountain Water
Curriculum Connection
American History: Closing of the Western Frontier, Dam Building and Water Projects
Geography: The Arid West and Colorado River Basin
Political Science: Wilderness and Public Land
Science: Desert Ecology, Conservation Biology
 
Symposia
The Future of the Great Salt Lake
The Colorado River Compact in the 21st Century
Public Lands in a Changing West
 
Pairs well with
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Lake Bonneville Storymap
Great Salt Lake Basin: Connections Challenges and Solutions
Beyond the Hundredth Meridian
Curriculum Connection
Science: Geology and Hydrology of the Colorado Plateaus
American History: Westward Expansion and Manifest Destiny
Geography: Watersheds as geographic boundaries
Political Science: The Colorado River Compact
 
Symposia
The Colorado River Compact: Navigating the Future
Water in the West: Exploring Untapped Solutions
The Colorado River Compact in the 21st Century
 
Pairs well with
Cadillac Desert by Mark Reisner
Thoughts in a Dry Land and Living Dry
(From Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs)
 
“You have to get over the color green; you have to quit associating beauty with gardens and lawns. You have to get used to an inhuman scale.”
 
Curriculum Connection
Language Arts: 20th Century American Literature
American History: Closing of the Western Frontier
Geography: The Arid West
 
Symposia
Religion, Faith, and the Environment
The Challenges of Sustainability
The Future of the Great Salt Lake
 
Pairs well with
Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams
Lake Bonneville Storymap
Great Salt Lake Basin: Connections Challenges and Solutions
Joe Hill (a.k.a. The Preacher and the Slave)
Curriculum Connection
American History: labor and capitalism; civil rights
Social Studies: redlining and environmental justice
Language Arts: 20th Century American Literature
 
Symposia
Breathing Easier: Air Pollution Challenges and Solutions
Silent Spring at 50: The Legacy of Rachel Carson
 
Pairs well with
Mapping Inequality
Not Even Past: Social Vulnerability and the Legacy of Redlining
The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein
Photo credit: Joe Hill Organizing Committee
More About Wallace Stegner
For additional information on Wallace Stegner, please see recordings from the Stegner Center’s 14th annual symposium, Wallace Stegner: His Life and Legacy.
 
To learn more about Wallace Stegner, visit the Wallace Stegner Archives, the Wallace Stegner Exhibit and the Wallace Stegner website hosted by the University of Utah Marriott Library.
 
Watch a KUED documentary about Wallace Stegner.
 
Watch Wallace Stegner A Writer's Life, narrated by Robert Redford.

Content composed by Robert Wilson.

Graduation Requirements


Utah High School Graduation Requirements

  1. English/Language Arts: 4 credits26
  2. Mathematics: 3 credits26
  3. Science: 3 credits26
    • At least 2 credits must be from foundational areas such as Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, or Physics3
  4. Social Studies: 3 credits26
    • This includes courses in U.S. History, World Geography, and U.S. Government and Citizenship2