Encyclopedia Dubuque
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STEGNER, Mary Stuart Page: Difference between revisions
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[[Image:mwsteg2.gif|left|thumb|250px|Wallace and Mary Stegner]]STEGNER, Mary Stuart Page. (Dubuque, IA-- ). Writer and musician. Famed writer Wallace Stegner and his wife Mary Stuart Page Stegner lived a 'personal literary partnership of singular facility' according to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. | [[Image:mwsteg2.gif|left|thumb|250px|Wallace and Mary Stegner]]STEGNER, Mary Stuart Page. (Dubuque, IA-- ). Writer and musician. Famed writer Wallace Stegner and his wife Mary Stuart Page Stegner lived a 'personal literary partnership of singular facility' according to author and historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. | ||
The Stegners met at Augustana College while Wallace was working on his doctorate and serving as the acting head of the English Department. Mary was working in the university library. They married on September 1, 1934 in Mary's parents' home in Dubuque. She was a descendant of the family that established the [[PAGE HOTEL]]. | The Stegners met at Augustana College while Wallace was working on his doctorate and serving as the acting head of the English Department. Mary was working in the university library. They married on September 1, 1934 in Mary's parents' home in Dubuque. She was a descendant of the family that established the [[PAGE HOTEL]]. | ||
Revision as of 05:53, 30 January 2010
STEGNER, Mary Stuart Page. (Dubuque, IA-- ). Writer and musician. Famed writer Wallace Stegner and his wife Mary Stuart Page Stegner lived a 'personal literary partnership of singular facility' according to author and historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
The Stegners met at Augustana College while Wallace was working on his doctorate and serving as the acting head of the English Department. Mary was working in the university library. They married on September 1, 1934 in Mary's parents' home in Dubuque. She was a descendant of the family that established the PAGE HOTEL.
Mary came to serve as the first reader of all of his husband's manuscripts. She watched mainly for problems of tone and inserted small check marks. She then read the passages aloud to her husband and discussed her thoughts with him. He used parts of her character in novels especially All the Little Live Things and The Spectator Bird.
They each served as Houghton Mifflin's West Coast editor in the post WORLD WAR II years. She edited a volume of O. Henry short stories and, as an accomplished violinist, played in a local symphony orchestra. Mary was an accomplished interior decorator and chose the Scandinavian furniture the Stegners preferred for the Jones Room in the Stanford (University) Library in Palo Alto, California where her husband's writing students met.
Nearly all of Wallace Stegner's books honored his wife. His last tribute in a collection of essays published one year before his death, read: "For Mary, who, like Dilsey, has seen the first and last, and been indispensable and enspiriting all the way." Dilsey was an African American cook in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, who shows devoted care for the Compson family.