In the American West, Stegner saw the possibility of a “geography of hope,” his famous phrase, a place where land and civilization, each carefully tended, could exist in relative harmony.

‘One man alone can be pretty dumb sometimes, but for real bona fide stupidity, there ain’t nothing can beat teamwork.’ Edward Abbey, Monkey Wrench Gang In style, compositional philosophy and persona, Stegner found himself on one tectonic plate while so many of his students sailed off on another. Taken collectively, the writing fellows of the new era were never Stegner’s “best” and far from his favorites, though he remained unfailingly gracious toward them. Abbey arrived in 1957, Kesey in 1959 and McMurtry in 1960. When the straitlaces of the 1950s started to come undone, Stegner’s writing program began to draw a new breed of ambitious young writer. He called them “the best students, and the most motivated, that any professor ever had.” Stegner understood this group of young men and their themes of brotherhood, sacrifice, and the unsettling twists of mind and fate brought about by war.

Stegner established Stanford’s creative writing department and the fellowships that now bear his name in 1946, initially catering the program to post–World War II GIs who were returning home with stories to tell. By the time Stegner retired from teaching 25 years later, in 1971, he had taught many students who went on to become household names, from Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, ’50, LLB ’52, to back-to-the-land prophet Wendell Berry, and from renowned English professor emerita Nancy Packer to Pulitzer winner N. Stegner came to Stanford from Harvard before his Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose, before his National Book Award, before his famous Wilderness Letter, which directly influenced Congress’s Wilderness Act of 1964 (see sidebar). He would become known as the dean of Western writers. But first, they traveled to Stanford to study in the program built by Wallace Stegner, the man who had already remade the literary West before them. Each reshaped the American West in his own image, creating new archetypes and tearing down traditions. They’ve all left us now, McMurtry the last of them when he died in March in his native Texas at the age of 84. Among them, they authored more than 65 books. The three writers would become, respectively, a wild-eyed oracle of the new environmental movement, a counter-cultural hero, and one of the great storytellers of the 20th century. As the 1950s became the 1960s-that time of incipient American revolutions-the now-legendary American authors Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey and Larry McMurtry all stalked the Quad in the formative years of their careers.

Kesey sometimes a great notion