Mary Stegner, 99, Widow of Wallace Stegner, "The dean of Western writers"
Hoodoo
"Wherever he went, she followed," said son Stuart Page Stegner.
By Ben Fulton
The Salt Lake Tribune
05/20/2010 07:35:51 AM MDT
http://www.sltrib.com/D=g/ci_15120021
http://extras.mnginteractive.com/live/media/site297/2010/0520/20100520__MaryStegner_obit_052010~P1.jpg
Mary Stegner
He served her breakfast in bed most mornings during their 59 years of
marriage. In return, Mary Stegner guarded the gate of his study, where
husband Wallace produced works that earned him the title of "The dean of
Western writers."
More than 16 years after his death in a hospital after a car crash in
New Mexico, Mary Stegner passed away May 15 in her sleep at a retirement
center in Portola Valley, Calif. She was 99. The cause of death was
simply old age, said son Stuart Page Stegner.
"One of the things my father's biographers were disappointed about was
that there were no skeletons in their closet," Stegner said from his
Santa Fe home. "They were a devoted couple."
Born 1911 in Dubuque, Iowa, Mary first met Wallace as an undergraduate
student at the University of Iowa. She worked in the school library,
while Wallace studied for his doctoral degree. The two married in 1934,
then moved to Salt Lake City where Wallace taught at the University of
Utah and where their son was born in 1937.
The young family then moved to Madison, Wis., and to Harvard, where
Wallace Stegner taught. Stanford University, where Wallace founded the
university's creative writing program, became the family's permanent
home for years.
Wallace, who won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for his novel Angle of Repose,
dedicated his last novel, 1987's Crossing to Safety , to Mary.
In the book Stealing Glances: Three Interviews with Wallace Stegner by
James R. Hepworth, Wallace described his wife as central to his life and
success.
"She has had no role in my life except to keep me sane, fed, housed,
amused, and protected from unwanted telephone calls," Stegner said,
"also to restrain me fairly frequently from making a horse's ass of
myself in public, to force me to attend to books and ideas from which
she knows I will learn something; also to mend my wounds when I am
misused by the world, to implant ideas in my head and stir the soil
around them, to keep me from falling into a comfortable torpor, to
agitate my sleeping hours with problems that I would not otherwise
attend to; also to remind me constantly (not by precept but by example)
how fortunate I have been to live for fifty-three years with a woman
that bright, alert, charming, and supportive."
Stuart Page Stegner said that while his mother was an accomplished
violinist with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, most of her attentions
were lavished on her husband and marriage.
"She quite deliberately decided that his gifts and talents were so
great, the best role she would play was to be his helpmate," he said.
"She wouldn't win any points in the modern women's movement for that,
but that's what she did, and did deliberately."
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