The Uneasy Chair

Bernard Devoto was a wild intellectual from the Rocky Mountains, a rebel, iconolclast, and idealist who fled his stifling small town for teh intellectual freedom and community of Harvard. While he settled eastwrad in his career as a novelist, professor, editor, historian, and critic, he continued to love, to a point of passion, western openness, fgreedom, air, and society.National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author and fellow westerner Wallace Stegner's life intersected with Devoto's many times, first by accident and later by friendship and example. They were kindred, both westerners by birth, upbringing, and demeanor, novelists by vocation, teachers by necessity, and historiuans and conservationists by a sheer compulsion inspired by the region that shaped them.