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