In this readable biography, Fradkin “goes looking” for Wallace Stegner in any number of places. He looks for him in actual locations: California, Vermont, Saskatchewan, Utah, Seattle, Great Falls, Madison, Harvard. He looks for him in the roles he adopted: teacher, writer, conservationist. He looks for him in the relationships he had with students, colleagues, family, and friends. Fradkin, a journalist, looks in the places good journalists search for their information, and his book has uncovered a large amount of it on Stegner's life that has not appeared in the previous biographies by Jackson Benson, and Forrest and Margaret Robinson. Both earlier biographies link Stegner's life and works, which Fradkin's does not. Fradkin does not look at the literature, but the life. This suggests that he believes the two are separable. Some critics might think otherwise. The picture of Stegner that emerges from this biography may in some respects be a valid one. Fradkin shows us a man sometimes irascible, grudge-holding, slightly problematic in familial relations, focussed to the point of narrowness is some areas, intractable in others; yet enormously hard-working, dedicated, inspiring, thoughtful, and generous. But this is not the whole picture.

In largely bypassing the literature, except as it related to events in Stegner's life, Fradkin somewhat misses Stegner's true importance. Despite his rather old-fashioned, conservative image, Stegner's writing reveals that he was in the vanguard of some of the major social and ideological changes which swept through American society in the 1960s and 1970s. His questioning of the myth of the frontier and his ardent conservationism preceded both the New Historians and the popular wave of environmental activism of the 1960s and 1970s. His concern with the lives of women in the West and his deep respect for the female perspective marked him as a precursor to later feminist thinking, and earned him the respect of many feminist critics. These things, coupled with his clear links to Transcendentalist thought, make Stegner one of the most original and important American writers.

In Fradkin's study some points are revealing. For example, the well-known disagreement between Stegner and Gary Snyder is discussed – it must be added, to the credit of neither man. Stegner's issues with Ken Kesey, a former student, and various other literary figures are also held up for our scrutiny. Academic battles are revisited. Much of the detail of Stegner's early life available to readers of his works is revisited. What these things tell us is that Stegner was a man like any other, and that the minefield of academic life took its toll on him as on so many others. Comparing itself with Benson and the Robinsons' works on the very first page, and, further, thanking those scholars for “breaking the Stegner trail,” suggests that Fradkin considers his approach more accessible, less restricted than the previous works. In fact Fradkin has gone off on a trail of his own, not one which Stegner scholars necessarily need follow, but one which may well lead some readers into a greater appreciation of the author rightly known as the Dean of Western Letters.