We are angry around here these days. Angry that serious writing is no longer taken seriously, at least in the city where most of our country’s writing gets published. The bean counters have taken over the publishing world as never before, aided by a sci-fi gizmo called Bookscan and by their dark allies, the marketers, down in their caves, calculating. But not all of us want to read books about vampires or ghosts, or the bolstered books reports that now pass for creative nonfiction. We want to read beautiful, strange, and moving words about people and places we care about, words that might just have an impact on our lives.

It helps to put things in a bit of a historical perspective and to realize that railing against New York is not a new sport. Last summer there was a great piece by Timothy Egan on the New York Times Blog about Wallace Stegner’s lifelong bitterness toward the New York Times. Stegner’s anger was a reflection of what he perceived as that paper’s prejudice against the West, though any region (other than that small one on a chunk of glaciated bedrock called Manhattan) could make a similar case.

Like Stegner, his former student Edward Abbey had a chip on his shoulders about the career-deflating tag of “regional writer.” But the tags have stuck to some extent. Ask a semi-literary Easterner about the duo, so well known on their home turf, and you might hear “Wallace Stevens? Edward Albee?” Abbey, as usual, was more confrontational about his geographic inferiority complex. When a friend from New York City suggested that the problem was that Abbey was a big fish in a small pond while he, the New York friend, was a small fish in a big pond, Abbey muttered: “Perfect. This guy thinks New York is the big pond, and the American West the small one.”

More and more writers feel themselves barricaded outside the walls of New York, even as the editors within feel the whole place crumbling down around them. But as an antidote to despair, it helps to look at Stegner as a model. Not just as model of battling against a literary society that favors the new and glib, and that is manned at the gates by those with little knowledge of literature’s complex and joyous heritage, but as a model of an extra-literary life both beyond New York and beyond despair. This is more than just a case of transmuting personal bitterness; it is embracing a broader vision of what it means to be a writer.

Stegner points the way. He points the way through his teaching of young writers, his efforts to keep traditions and possibilities alive that are scorned within the moneyed canyons of New York. He points the way through his passionate yet practical environmental fights, fights he maintained through many years and many battles. He also points the way through his deep reading of past greats, keeping a lifeline open that extends beyond the present time and its fashions, and giving him recourse to a dialogue with like minds over the centuries. And, finally, he points the way by reminding us that you can be both a great writer and a good human being.

I will admit that, growing up, my ideal of the literary life was a New York ideal. I wanted to be Thomas Wolfe howling with delight as I prowled the streets after Max Perkins had accepted my wild, disheveled tome of a manuscript. Moreover, I embraced the ideal of a monkish devotion to literature at the cost of everything else: friendship, marriage, good manners, sobriety, common sense, the land around me. Stegner acts as a corrective to that narcissistic and delusional way of seeing the world. His model offers all of us the possibility of a new and complex literary life, a life of commitment to the work, to the land, to friends, and to our students, who just might carry on the great underappreciated traditions despite the bankrupt state of the publishing world.

I enjoyed Jackson J. Benson’s biography of Stegner, but I was haunted by one image in it. When Stegner died at eighty-three, in 1993, he left a long, unfinished things-to-do list on his desk. I’ve thought about that list often enough over the last few years. Things-to-do lists have a way of prodding you until you check the items off, and that, I’ve come to believe, is a good thing. When I think of Stegner’s list I think that I, and other writers who aspire to be more than just writers, should feel prodded by it. We should see in it our own unfinished business. We should see in it the need to continue the work that Stegner started.

—David Gessner

Read more of his thoughts on writing at Cocktail Hour.