{"product_id":"the-uneasy-chair-a-biography-of-bernard-devoto-9780385078849","title":"The uneasy chair;: A biography of Bernard DeVoto","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45646915698741,"sku":"ByrdShop_0385078846","price":102.73,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780385078849.jpg?v=1781681594","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/the-uneasy-chair-a-biography-of-bernard-devoto-9780385078849","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}