I first stumbled upon the writing of Wallace Stegner nearly 20 years ago when I was staying with friends at a lonely ranch on Montana's Smith River. It was a Stegnerian kind of place—big sky, howling wind, gophers that needed shooting (and we trigger-happy guests were keen to oblige). Somewhere among the bric-a-brac of my log cabin was a copy of the Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. I remember digging into that book with peculiar gusto, as though it were some artifact indigenous to the setting, as Western as tumbleweed or a stock-tank windmill.

From the opening page, Stegner slayed me. Here were stories with poise and clarity and (dare I say it?) wisdom, old-fashioned stories dead-bolted to their landscapes. More than anything else, I remember Stegner's voice: stoic, searching, steadfast, alive to the bindings of history and the thrall of place.

But I kept flipping back to the author bio on the jacket. Wallace who? This extraordinary writer had taken home wheelbarrow-loads of prizes and, as a professor, had directly influenced half the leading lights of modern American literature. Tom McGuane, Wendell Berry, Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry, and Scott Turow, among many others, had passed through the acclaimed creative writing program that Stegner founded at Stanford and ran for decades. Ken Kesey, another "Wally" alum, once said that studying under Stegner was like playing football for Vince Lombardi.

Though he'd been writing steadily since the 1930s, for most of his life, the "dean of Western letters," as Stegner was sometimes known, just couldn't break onto the Eastern radar screen (despite teaching stints at Bread Loaf and Harvard). The New York Times didn't even review his masterpiece novel, Angle of Repose, which claimed the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. Six years later, the Times likewise failed to take notice of his National Book Award-winning The Spectator Bird.

And so Stegner became the American literati's most highly decorated nobody. His personal life didn't help: Hopelessly monogamous and a self-described square, he never stabbed his wife, never ran quixotic bids for mayor, and never threw a single celebrity masquerade ball. It was telling that when the Times finally did get around to doing a feature about him, the photo caption read "William Stegner."

Such slights alternately amused and depressed him, but throughout his long and multifaceted life, Stegner never stopped writing. He was a "sticker," as he liked to say, a term of honor from his hardscrabble prairie upbringing. In all, he wrote nearly 40 books. He was also one of the lions of the environmental movement—working in the Kennedy administration, serving with his close friend Ansel Adams on the board of the Sierra Club, and penning pitch-perfect wilderness manifestos that are quoted to this day.

This year, there's been something of a Stegner resurgence. In December, Shoemaker & Hoard published The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner (edited by his son, the writer Page Stegner), and a previously unpublished nonfiction work, Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil, came out in September from Selwa Press. In March, a major Stegner symposium will be held in Point Reyes, California—a literary conclave that promises a full summoning of the Wally Tribe. And this month Knopf will publish an important new biography, Wallace Stegner and the American West, by Philip L. Fradkin.