Stegner, author and UCSC professor, dies

He graduated from Palo Alto High School before attending Stanford

SANTA CRUZ » Stuart Page Stegner, the author, environmentalist and UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus, died Dec. 14 in Reno, Nevada. He was 80.

The son of Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner, Page Stegner published three novels and eight books of nonfiction. His nonfiction work focused on nature conservancy, the American West and the works of novelist Vladimir Nabokov.

His essays and reviews frequently appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic and Esquire. According to Stegner’swife, the author LynnStegner, hiswriting onNabokov’swork earned rare praise from the famed RussianAmerican author himself.

Stegner taught at UC Santa Cruz from 1968 through 1994, where he helped to pioneer its creative writing program and recruited notable authors including the novelist James D. Houston and poet Al Young.

“He wrote with great clarity and a sense of humor that I found quite satisfying and sometimes surprising,” said Young, a former Poet Laureate of California who shared an office with Stegner while he taught at UCSC.

Young recalled Stegner’s devotion to literature and music as well as the at-times rakishness with which he would approach his professorial duties — scattering paper and books on his desk to give himself the appearance of being busy before hiding out down the hall to work on his own writing.

“That was one ofhis little ploys to get work done,” Young said.

Stegner’s interests extended beyond literature, according to those who knew him, including nature conservancy, river rafting and bluegrass guitar. Stegner was closely involved with the activismthat led to the pres-

ervation ofMono Lake, and in the early 1970s, Stegner took a three-year sabbatical from teaching to direct Peace Corps operations in Ecuador.

“He wanted to do everything,” Lynn Stegner said of her late husband. “He wanted to gobble life up.”

Born in 1937 in Salt Lake City, Stegner was raised in the company of some of the 20th century’s most iconic literary figures. The poet Robert Frost was a family friend, as was children’s author Theodor Geisel, better known by his pen name, Dr. Seuss.

Stegner graduated from Palo Alto High School before attending Stanford University, where he earned a history degree and in 1965, a doctorate in American literature.

He was hired as an assistant professor of American literature at UCSC after a three- year stint at Ohio State University.

At UCSC, Stegner led the campus’s new creative writing program for decades before retiring in 1994. During his tenure he published novels “The Edge” (1968), “Hawks and Harriers” (1972), “Sportscar Menopause” ( 1977) and a number of nonfiction works that extolled the beauty of the American West and railed against what he saw as poor management and threats to its future, including “Outposts of Eden: A Curmudgeon at Large in the American West” (1989).

He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Burney Le Boeuf, a UCSC professor emeritus of physical and biological sciences, said he became close friends with Stegner during their time on faculty and fondly remembered river rafting and camping trips up California’s northern coast.

“He had the gift of expression,” Le Boeuf said, recalling lengthy conversations on conservation and biology, issues on which he said Stegner was always well versed. “It was always great fun to talk to Page about things like that.”

Remembering him as a personality that was equal parts incisive and hilarious, Lynn Stegner said she was also continuously impressed with her late husband’s unflappable poise.

“He was one of themost incredibly loyal and steady people I have ever known in my life,” Lynn Stegner said. “He provided, not just to me, but to many people, an enormous ballast.”

Stegner is survived by his wife, Lynn Marie Stegner; his three children, Wallace Page Stegner, Rachael Stegner Sheedy, and Mary Allison Stegner; and three grandchildren, Sheridan Stegner, Dillon Sheedy and Emma Sheedy.

In lieu of f lowers, his family asks that any contribution be made to the Nature Conservancy of Utah.