In The Most Beautiful Place on Earth Matthew Stewart describes Wallace Stegner as a “mid-century liberal realist and meliorist,” (140) whose writing staged a “revolt toward order and tradition” (8). Although Stewart never explicitly says so, his study of Stegner in California seems aimed at readers like me—people from the sixties counterculture whom Stegner largely despised and who returned the favor. In those Vietnam years, our avowed enemies were not conservatives, people whom we dismissed, but liberals like Stegner who seemed to control the country. After reading Stewart’s original, compelling, and thought-provoking book, I am ready to admit that Stegner deserves another look. I certainly underestimated his originality and importance.
Stewart focuses largely on the novels Stegner wrote while he lived in Los Altos Hills, the San Francisco suburb where he spent most of his adult life. Los Altos Hills was more than a beautiful place from which Stegner wrote...
University of California Press