Wallace Stegner was born on February 18, 1909, in Lake Mills, Iowa. He was awarded a Little, Brown Prize for his first novel, Remembering Laughter (1937), and the National Book Award for Angle of Repose (1971). Stegner’s novels, stories, and nonfiction exhibit a fascination with the American West. He tracks his protagonists, often writers or academics like himself, as they undertake transcontinental travel, attentively depicting the landscapes through which they move. The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), Recapitulation (1979), and Crossing to Safety (1987) are among the most well known of his thirteen novels. Stegner directed the creative writing program at Stanford University from 1945 to 1971, and passed more than fifty summers in the small town of Greensboro, Vermont. He died on April 13, 1993, in Santa Fe, New Mexico.