Pulitzer Author Wallace Stegner Dies At 84

SANTE FE, N.M. - Wallace Stegner, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who celebrated the spirit of the American West in his novels and nonfiction, died of injuries suffered in a traffic accident. He was 84.

Stegner, of Los Altos Hills, Calif., was injured March 28 while in Santa Fe to give a speech. He died last night at St. Vincent Hospital, a hospital spokeswoman said.

In a career that spanned more than 50 years, he celebrated the courage and optimism of the pioneers and the beauty and vastness of the West.

He won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for "Angle of Repose," a novel about an elderly, ailing man who gains acceptance of his family troubles when he researches the lives of his own pioneer grandparents.

In 1977, he won a National Book Award for "The Spectator Bird." He has been nominated several times for the National Book Critics Circle awards, including this year for his 1992 collection of essays, "Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West."

One of his most popular novels was "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," a semi-autobiographical work from 1943 about a man's unsuccessful efforts to succeed in the West.

Besides writing and editing, Stegner had a long career as a teacher of creative writing and literature at the University of Utah, the University of Wisconsin, Harvard and Stanford University, where he worked from 1945 until his retirement in 1971.

Stegner was born Feb. 18, 1909, in Lake Mills, Iowa, the son of Scandinavian immigrants. He earned a bachlor's degree from the University of Utah in 1930, a master's degree from the University of Iowa in 1932 and a doctorate from Iowa in 1935.