David Gessner Quote
Just as important is what writing the book did to Stegner’s thinking. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a visionary story of the West, but it is also a biography of Powell’s beautiful mind. Powell was, according to Stegner, incorrigibly sane, a man who tried to dispense with fable and dispel the mists, a man who saw the facts and not the romance. The real enemies were not just greedy and stubborn congressmen but credulity, superstition, habit. In many ways Stegner subsumed Powell’s own thinking and brought it into a new century. Ideas that were before then half-formed for Stegner became habitual. Like Powell himself, Stegner had a bolder, generalizing imagination than most who struggle to think historically, and, like Powell, he liked to apply his mind to actual problems in the actual world. Both men believed that through hard thought and focused clarity we can get at certain truths. That our minds, uncultivated, go where they will, to the till or trough, but that trained and focused, they can be put to good, and even selfless, purpose. It was an old-fashioned value and one shared by both biographer and subject.
Just as important is what writing the book did to Stegner’s thinking. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian is a visionary story of the West, but it is also a biography of Powell’s beautiful mind. Powell was, according to Stegner, incorrigibly sane, a man who tried to dispense with fable and dispel the mists, a man who saw the facts and not the romance. The real enemies were not just greedy and stubborn congressmen but credulity, superstition, habit. In many ways Stegner subsumed Powell’s own thinking and brought it into a new century. Ideas that were before then half-formed for Stegner became habitual. Like Powell himself, Stegner had a bolder, generalizing imagination than most who struggle to think historically, and, like Powell, he liked to apply his mind to actual problems in the actual world. Both men believed that through hard thought and focused clarity we can get at certain truths. That our minds, uncultivated, go where they will, to the till or trough, but that trained and focused, they can be put to good, and even selfless, purpose. It was an old-fashioned value and one shared by both biographer and subject.
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About David Gessner
Gessner was born in Boston, Massachusetts and grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard College where he worked at the Harvard Crimson drawing political cartoons, most notably a drawing of Ronald Reagan urinating on an unemployed man in the gutter, entitled "The Trickle Down Theory". He was awarded his degree in 1983. He is married to the novelist Nina de Gramont.
He is the author of eleven books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir, and environmentalism, including Leave It As It Is: A Journey Through Theodore Roosevelt’s American Wilderness and the New York Times-bestselling All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West. His prizes include a Pushcart Prize, the John Burroughs Award for Best Nature Essay, the Association for Study of Literature and the Environment’s award for best book of creative writing, and the Reed Award for Best Book on the Southern Environment. In 2017 he appeared on the National Geographic Explorer show "The Call of the Wild".