Western American Literature

There are a number of biographical and literary parallels between Wallace Stegner and John Williams. They both came from working-class families sculpted by nineteenth-century westward expansion. Stegner's parents were itinerant migrants who moved extensively across the American Northwest. Williams's grandparents were products of the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889, and his father worked as a janitor in Wichita Falls, Texas (Shields 4). They each rebelled against their familial roots by pursuing literary studies. They were unusual among acclaimed authors of the twentieth century in that they acquired PhDs in literature, with Stegner receiving his doctorate from the University of Iowa in 1935 and Williams obtaining his doctorate from the University of Missouri in 1954. They both cultivated distinct forms of realism, adopting spare (if not stark) prose styles that stood in opposition to late twentieth-century postmodernist techniques. As Kerry Ahearn remarks, Stegner belongs to a "realistic stream of American fiction" that aims for a "controlled and rational" style (12). Jackson J. Benson notes, "His realism is sometimes so bitter-tasting that it is difficult for the reader to swallow" (Down 10). Williams, meanwhile, was a disciple of Yvor Winters, a Stanfordbased poet and critic who advocated a "restrained, classical style" and a species of authorial "stoicism," which involved "practicing rational acceptance of what is" (Shields 78). Working against trends [End Page 323] in late twentieth-century American fiction, Stegner and Williams also struggled to fit in with the prevailing literary and academic establishments of their times. Stegner taught at Harvard and Stanford, but he remained at odds with the cultural environments of these universities, ultimately leaving both of them. Williams, on the other hand, retained a position as an outsider among American novelists.¹ Finally, on a more general level, their literary works tend to share thematic perspectives and points of emphasis. Megan McGilchrist's statement that "Stegner's fiction concentrates on character development, self-awareness, personal loss, and the search for sanctuary in a world seen as hostile" could equally serve as a description of Williams's chief thematic concerns (1).²

The explicit parallels between these authors reflect some of the more complex intersections between their works, particularly Stegner's Angle of Repose (1971) and Williams's Butcher's Crossing (1960). Speaking broadly, the main overlaps between these novels involve their flexible approaches to generic conventions and their use of historical settings. They are both emphatically western novels, but they cannot really be classified as "Westerns" in the traditional sense of the term. Rather, both works adopt revisionary perspectives on the Western genre, questioning links between the American frontier and rugged individualism. In this way, Angle of Repose and Butcher's Crossing push back against older models of Western culture, especially those built around Frederick Jackson Turner's famous 1893 address "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," a work that locates an American ethos of individualism and liberty on the Western frontier.

At the same time, these novels also fit within an arc of new western history that unpacks and also critiques the implications of Turner's thesis. Writing in 1987 Patricia Nelson Limerick comments, "To many American historians, the Turner thesis was Western history," but she also asserts that the "apparently unifying concept of the frontier" proved to be limiting and exclusionary, packaging white nationalism, masculinism, and economic exploitation inside ideals of personal freedom (20–21). Relatedly, Richard White observes that the vision of the nineteenth-century frontier as an untamed wilderness populated by individual laborers is [End Page 324] misleading since "small, family-run enterprises and large private companies and public corporations developed side by side" (270). As works that fit within the ambit of new western history, Angle of Repose and Butcher's Crossing also subvert alliances between the nineteenth-century frontier and ideals of individualism grounded on labor conducted far from the centers of power in the East. As scholars have discussed, Stegner's antipathy to mythological ideals of individualism is one of the topics that surfaces repeatedly in his fictional...