The Most Beautiful Place on Earth

Matthew D. Stewart teaches humanities at The Ambrose School in Meridian, Idaho, and is associate editor at Front Porch Republic. He holds a PhD in his-tory from Syracuse University.

"Part field guide to Wallace Stegner's California novels, part hymn to Stegner's ideas of community and place, Matthew Stewart's graceful book asks what role the 20th-century California suburbs played in the author's famed geography of hope." --Tara Penry, past president, Western Literature Association "Although Stewart never explicitly says so, his study of Stegner in California seems aimed at readers like me--people from the sixties counterculture whom Stegner largely despised and who returned the favor. In those Vietnam years, our avowed enemies were not conservatives, people whom we dismissed, but liberals like Stegner who seemed to control the country. After reading Stewart's original, compelling, and thought-provoking book, I am ready to admit that Stegner deserves another look. I certainly underestimated his originality and importance."--Richard White (Stanford University), California History "Matthew Stewart's descriptions of Wallace Stegner's complex fictional universe are lucid, even lovely. And his analysis illustrates Stegner's nuanced feelings about localism and legacy: how tradition both liberates and entraps, how closed communities can become corrupted."--Kate Lucky, Current "Matthew Stewart is a historian who takes Stegner's fiction seriously as a guide to his thought about historical and social questions. His book offers an important and valuable reexamination of this multifaceted figure in the West." --William Handley, University of Southern California "An imagination like [Stegner's], fictions like his--born from affection--may not provide us with data or answers but may help us feel 'somehow more substantial and less troubled, characters more permanent.' And they may show us how we can help the land we find underfoot become a beloved, well-cared-for place. Stewart's book goes a long way towards helping us see the world, and its people, the way Stegner hoped we could." --Seth Wieck, Front Porch Republic "Provocative, extraordinarily well researched, and especially thoughtful. Matthew Stewart's study is a work of intellectual history, or if one wishes, a history of ideas. Through close, revealing readings of Stegner's novels and stories about California, Stewart provides a path-breaking examination of Stegner's thoughts, especially as they are related to such ideas as community, home, place, character, and sociocultural change." --Richard W. Etulain, University of New Mexico