Katherine Anne Porter, Malcolm Cowley, Frank O’Connor and Bernard DeVoto numbered among the other literati of the day who were frequent house guests. And on weekend evenings, the Stegners regularly opened their doors to fellows from the Creative Writing Program who came for the bountiful food and conversation.

The Stegners had been wintering in Santa Barbara in 1945 when the accomplished 36-year-old author and Harvard professor was offered a position teaching fiction and American literature at Stanford.

“We came up and were interviewed by people in the English department, and Wally decided not to return to Harvard,” Stegner recalls. “So we had a few of our furnishings packed up and sent out from Cambridge, and we never went back. I guess we were people who made up our minds pretty quickly.”

Wallace Stegner outlined several stipulations and the university agreed: He was to receive a full professorship with tenure, and a guarantee of no committee work and no morning classes.

“He always needed the mornings to write,” Stegner says. “I was here to answer the phone and take messages while he worked, and he would come in from his study about 11:30 to shower and shave and have lunch, and then tear down to Stanford for a 1 o’clock class.”

Within a year of his arrival, Wallace Stegner realized that the young GIs in his fiction-writing classes had stories that needed telling. At dinner one evening at the home of R. F. Jones, chair of the English department, he sat next to his boss’ brother, Edward H. Jones, a Greek scholar and physician.

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