We depend upon our famous writers to drink too much, marry too often, backstab their rivals, and sleep with their students. Wallace Stegner (1909–93), despite a long life at the center of things, never did any of that. He taught conscientiously, published abundantly, and sustained a monogamous marriage for 59 years. The only familiar note is his gradual disillusion­ment. As the American West that had forged his character and reputation vanished, Stegner found himself literally alone on a hill, surrounded by the garish manses of Silicon Valley. In the end he became attached to Vermont, where, as he observed, nature heals ­faster.

Stegner once said that Americans were “expected to make the whole pilgrimage of civilization in a single lifetime,” which was “a hell of a thing to ask of anybody.” His own trip started with an impoverished childhood in Iowa and points west and finished with more literary prizes and accomplishments than anyone could want. He started Stanford’s creative writing program in 1946 and ran it for decades; among the students influenced by his exhortation to “write what you know” were Wendell Berry, Edward Abbey, Ken Kesey (whose flippant philosophy—“write what you don’t know”—enraged Stegner), and Larry McMurtry. He served on the board of of the Sierra Club and helped to shape the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ environmental ­policies.

Best known for his ­Pulitzer-­winning novel 

 (1971), a multi-generational saga based on the life of writer and illustrator Mary Foote, Stegner wrote 12 other works of fiction and nine books of nonfiction. Among his most autobio­graphical novels were 

 (1987), a close study of the friendship between two married couples. Stegner also wrote a biography of conservationist John Wesley Powell and other works about the West. But Stegner didn't like being labeled a “western writer,” and with good reason: While attentive to the landscape, his novels were also psychologically probing, nuanced, and painfully ­honest.

Two previous academic biographies treated Stegner’s literary contributions. Philip Fradkin, an environmental writer based in northern California, aims instead to look at “the whole ­man—­or as close as I can get to ­him—­set against the passing backdrops of his life.” In an epilogue, he describes visits to Stegner’s childhood homes. Not much had stayed the ­same—­which, of course, is Fradkin’s point. To be western is to relinquish everything that was once ­familiar.

“I was born on wheels,” Stegner wrote of his itinerant frontier childhood. His mother and his only sibling died young; his father, a bootlegger and gambler, killed himself after shooting a girlfriend. Reacting to the instability of his early years, Stegner drove himself to succeed. After graduating from the University of Utah in 1930, he got a master’s and a doctorate at the University of Iowa. There, he met his wife, Mary, by all accounts an extreme hypo­chondriac, who nonetheless supported her hus­band’s ambitions “in the manner of a traditional politician’s wife . . . as buffer, filter, cook, hostess, and social secretary.” The Stegners’ only child, son Page, has said it was tough to find his own space in that ­equation.

Stegner never allowed teaching at Stanford to consume his whole life. He and his wife built a house in Los Altos Hills in 1949, amid pig farms and orchards. There he wrote for several hours each day. Over the next four decades, Stegner witnessed the population explosion that eventually drew him into the national conservation debate. In 1960, in an impassioned and widely circulated the geography of hope” became the environmental movement’s war cry, the West became, Fradkin says, Stegner’s geography of despair. Stegner’s greatest failing, in Fradkin’s view, was his inability to deal with the rapid change that is a constant of western ­life.

Fradkin’s environmentalist background makes him the right person to re-create Stegner’s physical landscape, and to understand Stegner’s contri­butions as a conservationist. He’s not always able to penetrate Stegner’s emotional landscape. Fortun­ately, for that readers can turn to Stegner’s fiction, where the writer laid bare his soul, as wide open as a western ­sky.

 is a writer and editor living in Connecticut. 

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A. J. Loftin on Wallace Stegner, whose fiction is "as wide open as a western sky."

Landscape Artist

If witches existed, John Demos would have found ­them.

He has been hunting them for the better part of five dec­ades, first as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Harvard in the 1960s, then as a professor of early American history at Yale. In 1982 Demos published a long scholarly book, 

Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England

, intended to be his last word on the subject. Yet he could hardly refuse the ­talk-­show invitations that came every Halloween, nor those 3 am calls from people fearing demonic possession. So when editors at Viking asked him to write another book on ­witch-­hunting, this time aimed at a general readership, Demos took the ­bait.

The result is a text of admirable if breakneck concision, slowed only by the gratuitous insertion of italics in certain sections (as if to warn: 

) and clunky headings such as “Mentality. How did witchcraft reflect, and contribute to, the prevailing worldview of its time?” Demos briefly considers the early Christian martyrs, tortured and killed by their countrymen, then races through the next 1,500 years of ­witch-­hunting in Europe, only slowing down when he revisits his area of expertise, colonial America. He reviews the last three decades of Salem witch trials scholarship, which has tried to explain the bizarre behaviors of accused and accuser by looking to science and medicine: Poisoning by ergot (a fungus hosted by cereal grains) could have caused hallucinations in the accused; epidemic encephalitis might have caused convulsions and other symptoms in the “victims.” But mostly such theories have failed the test of time, Demos says. He speculates instead that economic and religious challenges to the Puritan way of life, combined with the constant threat of Indian warfare, created “an overwhelming and highly toxic climate of fear.”

At last Demos ventures somewhat timidly into more recent centuries, to discuss the Chicago ­union-­organized Haymarket riots of 1886, the “Red Scare”–era of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, and the ­day­care “abuse” cases of the last 30 years. He zooms in on the sensational Fells Acres Day School case of the mid-1980s, in which ­child-­care providers in Malden, Massachusetts, were accused and ultimately convicted of sexually abusing their young charges, though many believed they were innocent. “Malden to Salem is barely a dozen miles,” Demos observes, as he considers the characteristics common to both witch hunts: “A panic atmosphere builds. . . . A sense of the de­mon­ic . . . serves as the animating core. The judicial system is immediately and fully engaged. . . . Intense, prolonged interrogation assumes central impor­tance. . . . Legal and moral precedents are tossed aside. . . . Children are centrally positioned [to] play a role that has, in effect, been assigned them by their elders.” He concludes: “And now I believe that I truly 

 said my last word on witchcraft history.”

Certainly Demos is entitled to stop writing about witchcraft. But this book, far from putting the matter to rest, simply invites more speculation. In treating modern instances, Demos repeatedly asks, “Was it a ­witch-­hunt?” bringing the intellectual scruples and caution of a scholar to bear on his answer. But a general reader doesn’t need to be convinced. Hell, ­yeah—­close enough. What we want to know is why we are still hunting for witches, whether at ­daycare centers or union meetings or mosques. Why, given all our liberal education and supposed psychological literacy, do we continue to project our fears onto other people? If we can’t help ourselves, can’t some safeguards be put into place to protect society’s scapegoats? Or does society need the ­ritual—­the threat, the war on terror, the bloody retribution and fleeting ­absolution?

A much scarier book could have been written—a book only a witch might ­enjoy.

 is a writer and editor living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

The Enemy Within: 2,000 Years of Witch-Hunting in the Western World

Cover photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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A. J. Loftin reviews a history of witch-hunting, concluding that "If witches existed, John Demos would have found them."

Broomsticks and Politics

 reviews serious, intelligent books no student of literature will read 50 years from now. Or so Gordon Hutner believes—and historically, he’s got a point.

Hutner, an English professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the founding editor of the journal 

, spent quite a few years reading the books we don’t read in English class. Not the potboilers and thrillers, but the 

 bestsellers and prizewinners, the books that were respectfully reviewed and passed around among an educated, enlightened readership in the first half of the 20th century, then largely forgotten. His theory is that these books didn’t make it into the canon because influential literary critics and academics, especially those who came a generation or so after, passed over books that described the realities of their own middle-class lives. Instead they championed difficult books, books that were critical of the middle class, or books subversive of middle-class values.

As a result, those who wrote in “the majoritarian tradition” of regionalism, historical fiction, family sagas, and novels of middle-class manners are rarely studied these days. Hutner names Josephine Lawrence, John P. Marquand, Michael Foster, Ruth Suckow, George Weller, and Waters E. Turpin as once well-known writers whose reputations did not endure. Well, it’s true that I’ve never read Marquand, who won a Pulitzer Prize for 

 (1937), but I recognize the name. Waters Turpin—now there’s a name I’ve heard, but OK, it’s true, I haven’t read 

 (1939), a novel about the black migration northward, praised for its “social and historical sweep” by 

Hutner concedes that feminist scholars have recovered some of the important women who wrote in the first half of the 20th century, namely Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Fannie Hurst, and Zora Neale Hurston. But where, he asks, is Helen Hull’s 

 (1933), “the story of a wife who helps her husband through the loss of his business position”?

If Hutner’s analysis holds true for the future, Philip Roth may yet get his comeuppance, and by 2050 John Updike will be out on the street.

Hutner is not saying that the unsung books are better, exactly, although he says some of them, unsurprisingly, are very, very good. But he wants English majors to read more widely, with an eye toward America’s cultural history. “Like the middle class itself, the America that these novels amply witness is not inert but insistently supple, always redefining its boundaries, redesigning its purposes, rearticulating its bewilderments, reaffirming its triumphs, and reenacting its worries.”

 supplies a chapter for each decade, and (perhaps because I was born then) I found Hutner’s discussion of the 1950s most interesting. That was the moment, he says, when book reviewers began losing their ability to shape American cultural life. Critics openly “despised and mocked the ambitions and experience of a large portion of the book-buying public—the middle class—and scholars, as a group, turned away from the interest of middle-class social experience in fiction and settled their attention on formal achievements,” heralding the postmodern patter of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and Thomas Pynchon. Already the novel was said to be dead or in decline. Two of that decade’s popular books, Allen Drury’s Pulitzer winner 

 (1955), survived only as movies. Frederick Buechner’s 

 (1958), one of many Washington novels of manners published in the 1950s, is rarely read anymore.

Hutner says he rejected at the outset the idea of writing a critical monograph about some of the books he rediscovered, in favor of a historical survey. And that’s the main problem with his book, at least for the middle-class reader. Since we haven’t read the books Hutner talks about, and since he doesn’t describe them in any detail, all we really get is a recitation of unfamiliar titles and authors, along with excerpts from the reviews published in 

. It’s like having a child tell you the plot of a movie you haven’t seen.

In short, this is a very long book once we take Hutner’s point. 

 is a legitimate corrective to the English department syllabus, but we don’t need a 450-page lecture. We probably just need to read some of these books and judge for ourselves.

magazine. She lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 

"What America Read: Taste, Class, and the Novel, 1920-1960"

 by Gordon Hunter, University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 

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If history repeats itself, the serious, intelligent books reviewed weekly by The New York Times will not be read by students of literature fifty years from now. 

The Middle-Class Ghetto

I'm sitting beside a tall stack of books by Jerome Kagan, published by Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, Basic Books. This stack doesn’t include Kagan’s papers (nearly 400), or his textbook Psychology: An Introduction, written with Julius Segal, which has gone through at least nine editions.

A professor emeritus at Harvard, Kagan, now 83, began his career at Yale, where his apprenticeship to behavioral researcher Frank Beach required him to masturbate a group of male dogs over several evenings. Eventually he got a day job, assessing children for a longitudinal study of childhood temperament at the Fels Research Institute. He moved to Harvard in 1964 and continued to study children. His research culminated in 

(1984), a developmental study that emphasized the enduring role of temperament. Kagan went on to codirect Harvard’s Mind/Brain/Behavior Interfaculty Initiative, an interdisciplinary program established in 1993 to investigate relationships between the nervous system, human behavior, and mental life.

The themes of Kagan’s books widened accordingly, to include more philosophical and cultural questions. Indeed, 

 revisits ideas Kagan advanced in previous books, namely 

 (2009)—the title of the latter an allusion to C. P. Snow’s influential lecture cautioning against the growing gulf between the sciences and the humanities. Where in 1959, Snow saw a schism, Kagan now sees a 21st-century Bermuda Triangle: social scientists, lost in the airspace between two great branches of knowledge, unwilling or unable to read the signals from either one.

 makes important criticisms of the profession: Psychologists should pay more attention to the setting, age, class, and cultural background of their research participants; researchers should look for patterns of measures rather than use single measures; and psychiatrists need to consider life circumstances rather than simply diagnosing patients and prescribing medication on the basis of symptoms. Kagan singles out the infamous 

Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

 for well-deserved scorn. However, most psychiatrists and psychologists see the 

 as not much more than a tool for billing insurance companies, so Kagan’s low opinion won’t be news to them.

Kagan is also annoyed by recent studies that claim to measure “happiness,” a social construct with dubious cross-cultural applications. Yet in 

 he advances as fact his own opinion about what makes people happy, namely, “commitment to a few unquestioned ethical beliefs.” I know some pretty cheerful people whose beliefs you wouldn’t touch with a pitchfork.

with a promise that he will make some constructive suggestions for change, but in his last chapter he doesn’t do much more than air his complaints on a loftier scale. And a section titled “Promising Reforms” meanders around before briefly alighting on Thomas More, the Old Testament, Chairman Mao, the late psychologist John Bowlby, Hollywood movies, and mathematician John von Neumann. Subheads such as “Look for Patterns” and “The Need for Patience” feel tacked on.

So who are psychology’s ghosts? The spooks pop out only at the curious end of this book, where they encounter “the muse of history, reclining on a cloud … continually altering the scenery and rewriting the script so that new generations speak new lines.” Kagan continues:

The muse smiles as she watches each cohort rage wildly at ghosts, trying to make sense of a script with a permanently unfathomable meaning while insisting that their lines are better than those of their neighbors. Although the initial role assignments were determined by throws of the dice, the muse is willing to give a new role and a revised script to those who pay the proper fee. To a select few, she whispers her secret: “Play your role with passion, even if you suspect that it is expendable, and allow the compassion you had as a child to balance the urge to always maximize the self.”

A man approaching the end of a remarkable social science career wants to speak philosophically? Fair enough, and lay readers will find much to admire in Kagan’s humanist approach. But as the corrective to an entire profession, 

 displays a rather insubstantial regard for literary style and scientific particulars. Social scientists may prefer to find their “way back” to Jerome Kagan’s earlier work.

 is a writer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Psychology's Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back

 by Jerome Kagan, Yale University Press, 392 pp. 