Wallace Stegner on Sam Adams . . . or Should We Say "Sam Adams"?

I think that one of the ways you can tell how good a writer is is by reading something s/he wrote on a topic that you don't care about. If the work still holds your interest, that's a great writer. So, for instance, I have no interest in lobsters or cruise ships, but David Foster Wallace wrote superb essays on both of those subjects. And I'd never even heard of John Wesley Powell before picking up Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West, but Wallace Stegner is making reading this book a most excellent experience.

As a matter of fact, I only picked up Beyond the Hundredth Meridian because I'd been meaning to read something by Wallace Stegner for a long time and hadn't gotten around to it, and when I was looking for a new book in the PLAYAWAY format (so I can listen whilst exercising), I spotted this one. 

But it is beautifully written, and the words Mr. Stegner uses give you not only a sense of his style, but also of his personality. Which is another thing great writers do. When you read the book, you start to know the wo/man. When you read all of her/his books, you get to know the wo/man very well. 

ANYway . . . here's a bit which I was particularly fond of:

"His career is a demonstration of how far a man could get in a new country on nothing but gall and the gift of gab, so long as what he said was what people wanted to believe. . . . [He was] a lunatic counterpoint, a parody in advance, a caricature just close enough to the real thing, just close enough to a big idea, to have been temporarily plausible and limitedly successful . . . . " 

And more,

"[He] could see through a glass eye so darkly that he denied geography, topography, meteorology, and the plain evidence of his senses, and his advice to America and his dream of the future floated upward on the draft of his own bombast."

And there's even more, but I'll stop there. You can read the rest for yourself if you need it. Google Books has a big old chunk of the text available.

And in addition to being an example of some fine writing on the part of Wallace Stegner, there's also something else about this bit that fascinates me. It just reminds me SO much of SOMEone . . . can't quite put my finger on it . . . . 

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