The uneasy chair;: A biography of Bernard DeVoto

About this book

"He was precocious alert intelligent brash challenging irreverent literary self-conscious insecure often ostentatiously crude sometimes insufferable " Wallace Stegner says of Bernard DeVoto who in the words of a childhood acquaintance was also "the ugliest most disagreeable boy you ever saw." Between the disagreeable boy and the literary lion a life unfolds full of comedy and drama as told in this definitive biography which brings together two exemplary American men of letters. Born within a dozen years of one another in small towns in Utah both men were as Stegner writes "novelists by intention teachers by necessity and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us." From this unique vantage point Stegner follows DeVotos path from his beloved but not particularly congenial Utah to the even less congenial Harvard where galvanized by the disregard of the aesthetes around him he commenced a career that over three and a half decades would embrace nearly every sort of literary enterprise: from modestly successful novels to prize-winning Western histories from the editorship of the Saturday Review to a famously combative long-running monthly column in Harpers "The Easy Chair." A nuanced portrait of a stormy literary life Stegners biography of DeVoto is also a window on the tumultuous world of American letters in the twentieth century.