Wallace Stegner saw his life simply as material for his fiction. On hearing that his father had died as the instigator of a murder/suicide, Stegner’s first thought was of his long-worked-on autobiographical novel. “So now I know how that damn book ends,” he mused.

Stegner wrestled his whole life with scars left by his unpredictable father and tough Great Plains upbringing, but the impression you get reading Philip Fradkin’s “Wallace Stegner and the American West” is that he ended up grateful to those painful experiences for providing him with the seed for making a living.

According to Fradkin, “Wally was a realist who depended upon his past for much of his material. He was as frugal with his stories as his mother had been with the skins of pears. He was the king of recycling stories.” That life was often grist to the Stegner literary mill is not to say that Stegner was less than a fine and serious writer worthy of study and biography. He was a professional to the bone, with all the good and bad that implies. From the Pulitzer-winning novel “Angle of Repose” to the environmental rhetoric of the “Wilderness Letter,” he was never less than smooth, persuasive and readable.

Stegner’s involvement with the West, the focus of Fradkin’s book, is an area where passion and professionalism are intertwined. Stegner’s well-known environmental activism originated in economics: “My article . . . leads me into the conservation business anyway,” he jauntily wrote in 1953, “so I might as well try to gratify [mentor Bernard De Voto] and turn a penny all at the same time.” Yet as Fradkin writes, “Stegner inhabited all of the West’s different landscapes physically, emotionally and mentally . . . embraced those spaces [and] gave them meaning” even in offhand musings like this one from late in life: “Space does something to the vision: It makes the country itself into something formidable and ever-present.”

Beginning in the 1950s, when he joined with the Sierra Club to preserve Dinosaur National Monument, Stegner left a long legacy of activism in his beloved West. During the Kennedy Administration he served in the office of Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, working to expand the national park system. And of course his writings, like “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” in Fradkin’s words, “constructed the historical foundation and framed the debate over water in the West that continues to this day.” Yet this deceptively complicated man chose at the end of his life to live in rural Vermont, where he could retreat from the change that was enveloping the regions he knew best.

A deep believer in his craft, Stegner also helped invent the creative writing program with his work at the University of Iowa, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and for decades at Stanford. “Too little attention,” writes Fradkin, “has been paid to how he helped spread the written words of others around the world.” Among the fiction writers who passed through Stegner’s Stanford program were Edward Abbey, Ernest J. Gaines, Larry McMurtry, Robert Stone and Ken Kesey. (Though the traditional Stegner was put off by Kesey’s antics, Fradkin touchingly devotes some space to establishing that Kesey kept seeking Stegner’s approval – as if the biographer is in turn trying to get Kesey’s approval, to validate his stodgy subject before a genuine hipster.)

“Wallace Stegner and the American West” is a solid and informative study of the roots and the course of a literary life. If Fradkin’s book doesn’t in the end tell the reader much about the private man, perhaps it is because Stegner chose to turn himself inside out and put whatever inner life he had on his own pages.

Billy Wisse is a television writer in Los Angeles.

Wallace Stegner and the American West

by Philip L. Fradkin

Knopf