By Peter Fish, editor-at-large, Sunset Magazine

For his fans—and there are a lot of them, even 15 years after his death—Wallace Stegner was the West. In biographies like Beyond the Hundredth Meridian and novels like Angle of Repose, Stegner showed how our past inspired and haunted our present. In more polemical works (mostly magazine and newspaper pieces) he condemned the way the West’s wasteful use of its resources threatened both its natural beauty and, ultimately, its future.

This month is a bonanza for Stegner readers. (And, if you aren’t one, it may provide reasons to join the crew.)  Up in Marin County, the estimable Point Reyes Books and the equally estimable Marin Agricultural Land Trust (which has preserved some 40,000 acres of farmland over the last 28 years) is sponsoring The Geography of Hope, a three-day conference on Stegner’s life and work. Guests include Stegner’s novelist son Page, U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Haas, and a number of other noted Western writers. The setting—the green hills around Point Reyes Station—is the living embodiment of the conference’s title, which is taken from one of Stegner’s most famous descriptions of his home region.

The roster of conference speakers also includes author Philip Fradkin, whose new Stegner biography—Wallace Stegner and the American West—is out this month. Fradkin, who has written fine books on the West's volatile natural history— A River No More, about the Colorado River,   Wildest Alaska  and The Great Earthquake and Firestorms of 1906—takes on a seemingly more sedentary subject here. Biographies of writers are notoriously problematic, because what writers mainly do is write, think about writing, and distract themselves from writing.  Sometimes the “distract themselves from writing” periods can include forays into alcoholism and adultery, and these  can spice up the pages for awhile. But eventually, it’s back to the Smith-Corona, or, now, the iMac, and the reader longs to read about, say, Bonnie and Clyde or Paris Hilton.

Luckily for Fradkin, Stegner had a long and eventful life.  As any reader of his memoir, Wolf Willow, or his autobiographical novel, The Big Rock Candy Mountain, knows, his childhood was hardscrabble, rootless, and shadowed by a ne’er-do-well father, all of which makes for good reading. If Fradkin’s accounts of rivalries within the Stanford English Department, where Stegner taught for years, are probably only interesting to people who spent time around the Quad (Ok, I admit, I’m one of them), the analyses of Stegner’s conservation battles make the issues seem urgent even today. As, indeed, most of them are.

So buy the biography. And, this weekend, consider heading up to Marin County to hear some of the West’s best contemporary writers discuss one of the West’s best writers of all time.