A Country in the Mind

by John Lovell Thomas

In this beautifully written account, John Thomas details an intimate portrait of the intellectual friendship between two commanding figures of western letters and the early environmental movement--Wallace Stegner and Bernard DeVoto.. The authors of enormously popular works--Stegner most well known for his novels The Big Rock CandyMountain and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose and DeVoto for his classic history of western exploration, The Course of Empire--they also played important roles in the efforts to stop government and private interests from carving up the vanishing West. Part of the fractious group of public intellectuals at Harvard that included Edmund Wilson, Mary McCarthy, and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., they saw no contradiction between their literary and political selves and entered the public debate with conviction and passion.

Drawing on their writings, personal correspondence, and dozens of articles from the pages of Harper's, where DeVoto was a columnist for years, this illuminating account demonstrates how their concerns for the western environment continue to resonate today.

256 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2000

About the author

John "Jack" Lovell Thomas was the George L. Littlefield Professor of American History at Brown University.

Reviews

[Richard]

This book, oddly enough, is quite topical, focusing as it does on the lives and writings of De Voto and Stegner as they developed into serious environmentalists.

The attention to the kind of "land grabs" that seem likely to be facilitated by the Trump Administration, mining, logging, oil, captured my interest and reminded me that I have never visited the storied West or the parks and Federal lands that are part of my heritage as a US citizen.

Having read earlier about the treatment of wolves and coyotes and the human insistence that "this land is our land" and having witnessed the same in a relatively small island population in which house pets shabbily cared for are an excuse for killing off wildlife, I found the struggles of these two men to try, through writing, lobbying, and other activities, to at least match if not overcome the work of exploitative corporate interests admirable.

Having read, years back, De Voto's histories and having had a friend study with Stegner at Stanford, I had more than a passing interest in the book which has been sitting in a bookcase next to my bed for years.

The style was workman-like, but the writing, like those of the subjects, was built on solid research. Some repetition was inevitable as De Voto and Stegner were close friends, came from the same area (Mormon country), and focused on similar concerns. Reading the volume was a positive experience, one that might well lead to activism.

[Wayne]

A cojoined biography of two superb writers and friends, each with one foot in New England and one in the West. Obliquely tells the sad tale of the decline of the American West, and how deVeto and Stegner fought to divert this sad trajectory (Spoiler alert: they lost.)