From Publishers Weekly
Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner are two of the most well-known literary men from the American West. Readers may well be familiar with DeVoto's capacious, riveting histories of the region, and Stegner's equally capacious and captivating novels set there. But most don't realize that the two men had a close friendship, cemented during their years together at Harvard and kept alive through decades of correspondence. Thomas, who teaches American history at Brown University (The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison), describes that friendship and the two writers' shared vocation. He opens with elegant, if largely derivative, biographical sketches of each. DeVoto, born in 1897 to a lapsed Catholic father and a lapsed Mormon mother, felt himself a sophisticated, intellectual outsider from provincial Ogden, Utah. Although he escaped east, he never truly escaped the lure of the West, musing and writing about it from his perch as editor of the Saturday Review. Stegner, originally from Iowa, followed his fortune-seeking father around the region, eventually making it to Salt Lake City. The two men were passionate conservationists; indeed, Stegner "credited" DeVoto with "converting him to environmental activism." Thomas declares that he is interested in the public lives, not the private, hidden goings-on of both men. That stance is refreshing in an age of tell-all psycho-biography; still, the book might have benefited from a bit more about the friendship the two men shared. Stegner paid tribute to his dear friend by writing DeVoto's biography. Thomas has honored both men with an essay that students of the American West won't want to miss. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Reviewed with Richard Holmes' Sidetracks.Two rather offbeat selections for lovers of biography.Holmes has devoted his career to the genre, most recently authoring a two-volume life of Coleridge, whose second volume (Coleridge: Darker Reflections , 1998) was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. As in his Footsteps (1985), Holmes gathers pieces that trace the biographer's own wanderings from subject to subject. Although most of the pieces are essays, the collection also includes a radio play, a ballet treatment, a lecture, character sketches, and a short story. The subjects are equally varied; they include Chatterton, Gautier and de Nerval, Wilde, J. S. Mill, Wollstonecraft and Godwin, Shelley, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Voltaire, and Boswell and Samuel Johnson. Holmes' introductions to each section sketch a bit of his own life's journey, explaining why exploring a particular person's life appealed to him at a specific point in time. A celebration of life . . and lives.Brown University historian Thomas has argued, e.g., in Alternative America (1983), that "the vision of another way--a middle road between a profit-driven market economy on the one side and a repressive collectivism on the other--has enjoyed a long if not always happy life" in the U.S. Thomas now adds DeVoto and Stegner to this venerable tradition in their capacity as artists and reformers devoted "to the ideal of a national commons owned and cared for by all the citizenry." The two men were friends as well as associates in the early years of the environmental movement, and Thomas' study is, in effect, the history of that friendship, and of the love for the land that animated both writers. An involving intellectual history. Mary Carroll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Publisher's Weekly
"Elegant...Thomas has honored both men with an essay that students of the American West won't want to miss."


Book Description
In this beautifully written account, John Thomas details an intimate portrait of the intellectual friendship between two commanding figures of western letters and the early environmental movement--Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto. The authors of enormously popular works--Stegner most well known for his novels The Big Rock Candy Mountain and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose and DeVoto for his classic history of western exploration, The Course of Empire--they also played important roles in the efforts to stop government and private interests from carving up the vanishing West. Part of the fractious group of public intellectuals at Harvard that included Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., they saw no contradiction between their literary and political selves and entered the public debate with conviction and passion. Drawing on their writings, personal correspondence, and dozens of articles from the pages of Harper's, where DeVoto was a columnist for years, Thomas places the two men in a vibrant American tradition, supporters of a national commons owned and cared for by all its citizens. The popular works of Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto remain in print decades after they were first published, and, as Thomas makes clear in this illuminating account, their concern for the western environment continues to resonate today.


About the Author
John Thomas is the George L. Littlefield Professor of American History at Brown University. He is the author of several works, including The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison and Alternative America. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In this beautifully written account, John Thomas details an intimate portrait of the intellectual friendship between two commanding figures of western letters and the early environmental movement--Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto. The authors of enormously popular works--Stegner most well known for his novels The Big Rock Candy Mountain and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose and DeVoto for his classic history of western exploration, The Course of Empire--they also played important roles in the efforts to stop government and private interests from carving up the vanishing West. Part of the fractious group of public intellectuals at Harvard that included Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., they saw no contradiction between their literary and political selves and entered the public debate with conviction and passion.

Drawing on their writings, personal correspondence, and dozens of articles from the pages of Harper's, where DeVoto was a columnist for years, Thomas places the two men in a vibrant American tradition, supporters of a national commons owned and cared for by all its citizens. The popular works of Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto remain in print decades after they were first published, and, as Thomas makes clear in this illuminating account, their concern for the western environment continues to resonate today.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner are two of the most well-known literary men from the American West. Readers may well be familiar with DeVoto's capacious, riveting histories of the region, and Stegner's equally capacious and captivating novels set there. But most don't realize that the two men had a close friendship, cemented during their years together at Harvard and kept alive through decades of correspondence. Thomas, who teaches American history at Brown University (The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison), describes that friendship and the two writers' shared vocation. He opens with elegant, if largely derivative, biographical sketches of each. DeVoto, born in 1897 to a lapsed Catholic father and a lapsed Mormon mother, felt himself a sophisticated, intellectual outsider from provincial Ogden, Utah. Although he escaped east, he never truly escaped the lure of the West, musing and writing about it from his perch as editor of the Saturday Review. Stegner, originally from Iowa, followed his fortune-seeking father around the region, eventually making it to Salt Lake City. The two men were passionate conservationists; indeed, Stegner "credited" DeVoto with "converting him to environmental activism." Thomas declares that he is interested in the public lives, not the private, hidden goings-on of both men. That stance is refreshing in an age of tell-all psycho-biography; still, the book might have benefited from a bit more about the friendship the two men shared. Stegner paid tribute to his dear friend by writing DeVoto's biography. Thomas has honored both men with an essay that students of the American West won't want to miss. (Nov.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Thomas (American history, Brown Univ.; The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison) provides an illuminating and well-integrated discussion of the professional lives of two men devoted to the concept of a national commons. Bernard DeVoto and Wallace Stegner--colleagues, authors, historians, reformers, and friends--serve as guides on this journey through the Mountain West. Their beliefs in a land ethic shared by citizen stewards and in government directives based on sound science as an environmentally friendly alternative to corporate looting serve as the centerpiece of this historical and geographical tour. The book's divisions--"Legacy," "History," "Land," and "Reprise"--focus on their ideas, rendering a history of the arid West, its governance, and the environmental movement. Discussions of writing, particularly as they relate to historical fiction, biography, and historically accurate accounts, add a further level of interest to this well-written book. Very relevant to contemporary issues, this is highly recommended for both public and academic libraries.--Sue Samson, Univ. of Montana Lib., Missoula Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Keen, admiring portraits of environmentalists DeVoto and Stegner from Brown University historian Thomas (Alternative America, not reviewed). DeVoto and Stegner, in the author's view, emerged from the alternative tradition in American discourse, a tradition that encompassed such disparate characters as Henry Demarest Lloyd, Upton Sinclair, and Lewis Mumford, and also sought to renew civic life in America through participatory democracy. Both were proponents of a"national commons" to be cared for by the citizenry—a place that would stand somewhere between rapacious entrepreneurial capitalism and repressive collectivism—and both appreciated"the increasingly dire need to save wilderness, protect parks and forests, and prevent further degradation of the West, which was proceeding rapidly with the consolidation of corporate capitalism": mining syndicates, lumber combines, and cattle empires were all active in a great public-land grab. Although Stegner was a sophisticate who found political bickering distasteful, and DeVoto a pugnacious eccentric fulminating from his bully pulpit at Harper's magazine, the two shared and helped shape a Western land ethic. They were pioneer popular historians in the sense that they brought a literary imagination to historical fact, and each came to respect the"grit, determination, endurance, neighborly concern, and instinctive cooperation" that typified Western settlers. Seeking"a country in the mind held together by cooperative values, social responsibility, participatory ceremonies, and collective purpose which it called on the federal government to foster and protect," DeVoto and Stegner sawclearlyenough that the protectors were often in cahoots with the bad guys, and they were happy to point this out. Thomas sets up shop in DeVoto and Stegner's heads, right where he ought to be for this intellectually spirited biographical essay. (photos, not seen)

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