Kittredge, William 1932–

(Owen Rountree, a joint pseudonym)

PERSONAL:

Born August 14, 1932, in Portland, OR; son of Oscar Franklin (a rancher) and Josephine Kittredge; children: Karen Kittredge Zarosinski, Bradley. Education: Oregon State University, B.S., 1953; attended University of Oregon, 1968; University of Iowa, M.F.A., 1969.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of English, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59801. Agent—Amanda Urban, International Creative Management, 40 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019.

CAREER:

McRanch, Adel, OR, cattle rancher and ranch manager, 1957-67; University of Montana, Missoula, assistant professor, 1969-74, associate professor, 1974-80, professor of English, 1980—. Northwest Review, Eugene, OR, assistant editor and consulting editor, 1968-70; Rocky Mountain Magazine, consulting editor, 1979-83; Pacific Northwest Magazine, consulting editor, 1979-86; Outside, consulting editor. Puerto Del Sol, advisory board member; Montana: Magazine of Western History, publication board member. Military service: U.S. Air Force, 1954-57.

AWARDS, HONORS:

University of Oregon Ernest Haycox Fiction prize, 1968; University of Montana summer grant, 1970, 1976, 1982, and Innovative Summer Program grant, 1977, 1978; Stegner fellow at Stanford University, 1973-74; grants from National Endowment for the Arts, 1974 and 1981; Montana Committee for the Humanities grant, 1979; PEN/NEA Syndicated Fiction Project award, 1983, 1988, and Fiction award, 1984; Neil Simon Award, 1984; Montana Governor's Award for the Arts, 1984; H.G. Merriam Award, 1988; Charles Frankel Prize, 1994; Robert Kirsch Award, Los Angeles Times, 2007.

WRITINGS:

The Van Gogh Field and Other Stories, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1979.

We Are Not in This Together (short stories), edited and with a foreword by Raymond Carver, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1982.

Owning It All: Essays, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1987.

Phantom Silver (short stories), Kutenai Press, 1987.

(Editor and author of introduction) Montana Spaces: Essays and Photographs in Celebration of Montana, photographs by John Smart, Nick Lyons Books, 1988.

(Editor; with Annick Smith) The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology, Montana Historical Society Press, 1988.

Hole in the Sky: A Memoir, Knopf (New York, NY), 1992.

(Contributor) Robert Helm, 1981-1993, University of Houston (Houston, TX), 1994.

Who Owns the West?, Mercury House (San Francisco, CA), 1996.

(Editor) The Portable Western Reader, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief, Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 1999.

The Nature of Generosity, Knopf (New York, NY), 2000.

Balancing Water: Restoring the Klamath Basin, photographs by Tupper Ansel Blake and Madeleine Graham Blake, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 2000.

Southwestern Homelands, National Geographic (Washington, DC), 2002.

The Best Short Stories of William Kittredge, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 2003.

(Editor; with Allen Morris Jones) The Best of Montana's Short Fiction, Lyons Press (Guilford, CT), 2004.

(Author of introduction) Monte Hartman, America's 100th Meridian: A Plains Journey, Texas Tech University Press (Lubbock, TX), 2005.

The Willow Field (novel) Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays, Graywolf Press (Saint Paul, MN), 2007.

EDITOR; WITH STEVEN M. KRAUZER

Great Action Stories, New American Library (New York, NY), 1977.

(And author of introduction) The Great American Detective (short stories), New American Library (New York, NY), 1978.

Stories into Film, Harper (New York, NY), 1979.

Also editor of Contemporary Western Fiction TriQuarterly, special edition, 1980.

"CORD" SERIES; WITH STEVEN M. KRAUZER; UNDER JOINT PSEUDONYM OWEN ROUNTREE

Cord, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1982.

The Nevada War, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1982.

Black Hills Gold, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1982.

Gunman Winter, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1983.

Hunt the Man Down, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1984.

King of Colorado, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1984.

Gunsmoke River, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1985.

Paradise Valley, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1986.

Brimstone Valley, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1986.

Contributor of stories and articles to periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Triquarterly, Iowa Review, Outside, Rolling Stone, and Paris Review.

SIDELIGHTS:

English professor and former rancher William Kittredge draws upon his experience in these two seemingly disparate fields when creating his diverse works chronicling the American West. As Noel Perrin stated in the Washington Post Book World, Kittredge "is a man straight out of Western myth, who left the family ranch in mid-career and went to graduate school … [and who] looks back on the ranch with the cool eyes of a psychologically oriented intellectual." Peter Wild, writing in Twentieth-Century Western Writers, discussed the similarities between Kittredge and his characters and suggested what those common bonds mean in his work. Wild observed that "his characters aren't necessarily versions of himself, but in the larger view the problems they contend with often are those Kittredge has struggled with, and in part resolved, over much of his life. This shakes down to basically one question: How should we live in the American West? The answer is not simple."

Montana Spaces: Essays and Photographs in Celebration of Montana, places Kittredge in an editorial role for this anthology of essays by over a dozen noted writers, accompanied by thirty-two black-and-white photos by John Smart. Montana Spaces is a literary and pictorial representation of life in the wilder areas of the state. In the nine-book "Cord" series of adventure novels, written with Steven M. Krauzer under the joint pseudonym Owen Rountree, Kittredge explores the Western milieu. Regarding one work, Cord: King of Colorado, Kristiana Gregory observed in the Los Angeles Times Book Review that the book displays "much color" and includes "interesting facts on miners, millionaires and other frontier fortunes."

Coedited by Annick Smith, The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology, gathers in its 1,161 pages a wide sampling of prose and poems by Montanans about their state. Included is work by well-known writers such as novelists Norman Maclean, Dorothy Johnson, A.B. Guthrie Jr., and Thomas McGuane, stylist Wallace Stegner, critic Leslie Fiedler, poet Richard Hugo, and essayist David Quammen. The work also features accounts by explorers Lewis and Clark and other Caucasian settlers, balanced by tales, myth, and testimony from the Native American viewpoint. Ginny Merriam, reviewing The Last Best Place in Chicago Tribune Books, called the anthology "probably the most ambitious project of its type in U.S. history."

Kittredge's Owning It All: Essays, "is one of the quintessential books to read if you want to understand the ferment of the modern West," wrote Nation contributor Philip Connors. His first collection of essays, filled with autobiographical sketches and contemporary observations, critiques popular myths of the West that valorize conquest and private property. It calls for renewed respect for the land, and for policies that favor economic and environmental justice. Kittredge, as a writer for Publishers Weekly observed, "stands valiantly at the center of a fledgling regional literature emerging from shattered myths and discarded ideals."

Hole in the Sky: A Memoir chronicles a life gone sour and a man seeking atonement and redemption. Kittredge, despite a childhood which on the surface might appear the epitome of the rewards promised by the American Dream, lived a waking nightmare—his father's disinheritance by Kittredge's driven, unyielding grandfather, his own inability to communicate on an emotional level with family members, and later, two failed marriages and alcoholism. As John Schulian noted in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, things only began their change for the better after Kittredge married for the third time and his wife "wound up holding his hand until his dream of writing for a living became a reality." Kittredge, Schulian added, "needed to soften the lump of coal his heart had become, to recapture his youthful connection not only to mankind but to nature," and the book "should be trumpeted as an act of courage. For rare is the writer who is as unflinchingly honest as Kittredge about his hostilities and resentments, his regrets and shame." Writing in the Tribune Books, Jane Smiley declared: "Hole in the Sky is a valuable memoir that should be read with care, for it explores the first American dream, the dream of property that was written into the Declaration of Independence before anyone thought of ‘the pursuit of happiness’ and still stands, for many, as the real American dream. It is a dream that William Kittredge has found false and hollow. His voice should be a prophetic one."

A passionate elegy to a once-pristine American West and plea for the restoration of our last and most important natural resource, Who Owns the West? interweaves reminiscences from Kittredge's boyhood with more recent tales of his travels across ranchlands and plains, woods and towns, alone or with others, including his good friend, the writer Raymond Carver. According to a reviewer for Publishers Weekly, Kittredge is particularly good at depicting the lives of ordinary denizens of this landscape—ranchers, hunters, and others—who struggle to reclaim some personal autonomy and thereby "regain some piece of their horribly depleted lands." Comparing the Who Owns the West? to the best work by Carver, the reviewer hailed the book as fitting reminder that the living world should not be taken for granted.

In The Nature of Generosity, Kittredge muses on art, nature, and culture as he travels to France, Alaska, and Peru. Throughout, he asks how and why various cultures have created social and political structures that degrade the environment and result in economic injustice; he argues that people should abandon such damaging habits and adopt instead what he calls "extreme long loop altruism," behavior that emphasizes sharing and generosity. Often inspired by art, Kittredge writes about his responses to the prehistoric cave paintings he saw in Europe as well as his viewing of Fra Angelico's early Renaissance frescoes and his love of Wordsworth's poetry. Donna Seaman, writing in Booklist, hailed Kittredge's writing as "provocative, imaginative, eloquent, and profoundly critical." A writer for Publishers Weekly, however, found the book's argument weakened by Kittredge's rushed prose and "jumbled summaries" of his thoughts and experiences.

Another volume inspired by travel, Southwestern Homelands, drew more consistently positive reviews. As described by Nation reviewer Philip Connors, the book contains "stories from thirty years of tooling the freeways and back roads of Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico," and Kittredge is "as fine a travel companion as a reader could hope for." The essays are unified by Kittredge's characteristic themes: modern ideas of progress, and its unacknowledged costs, and the need to imagine a way of life based on sharing. Kittredge recalls his encounter with a Hopi man who offered to explain his beliefs; the writer, mistrusting the man, turned away—to his lasting regret. The need to reach out to others, he comes to believe, is crucial to human life. As Connors noted, Kittredge "settles on a ‘message’ from the ancients: ‘Be communal, join up, share your goods, and once in a while give your sweet time away, no charge, pro bono, and you'll be as close to home as you're likely to be.’"

Kittredge's first novel, The Willow Field, is a multigenerational saga set in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana and in the desert of Nevada. The story begins in the 1930s, when Rossie Benasco decides to leave his family home in Reno "to be his own man with horses." He signs on with a big cattle drive that is moving 200 head from Nevada to Calgary, and soon meets the woman who will change his life, Eliza Stevenson. Their "transcendent" love, according to Booklist reviewer Bill Ott, is reminiscent of that between Rupert and Ursula in D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love. At the same time, the epic landscape of the American West is as much the heart of the book as is the love story itself. Kittredge, Ott concluded, "gets it exactly right" in this book. As the plot develops, Rossie marries and becomes a father; joins the Marines just after the attack on Pearl Harbor; and winds up in the treacherous field of local and state politics. Kittredge "moves Rossie along with a compelling confidence," observed a writer for Publishers Weekly, who described The Willow Field as a "memorable evocation of the American West."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Kittredge, William, Hole in the Sky: A Memoir, Vintage Books (New York, NY), 1992.

Twentieth-Century Western Writers, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1991.

PERIODICALS

American Libraries, June 1, 1987, review of Owning It All: Essays, p. 416; September 1, 1991, review of Owning It All, p. 824.

Apartment Life, December 1, 1980, Evelyn Renold, "Stories into Film," p. 115.

Booklist, February 15, 1996, Bill Ott, review of Who Owns the West?, p. 986; June 1, 1997, Brad Hooper, review of The Portable Western Reader, p. 1648; December 1, 2000, Donna Seaman, review of The Nature of Generosity, p. 691; June 1, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of Southwestern Homelands, p. 1673; October 15, 2004, Keir Graff, review of The Best of Montana's Short Fiction, p. 388; October 1, 2006, Bill Ott, review of The Willow Field, p. 37.

Christian Science Monitor, January 25, 2001, review of The Nature of Generosity, p. 20.

Film Quarterly, summer, 1981, Bill Desowitz, review of Stories into Film.

Humanities, September 1, 2001, "Outgrowing Myths," p. 4.

Internet Bookwatch, August 1, 2006, review of America's 100th Meridian.

Library Journal, August 1, 1987, Randy Dykhuis, review of Owning It All, p. 126; December 1, 1995, Randy Dykhuis, review of Who Owns the West?, p. 139; July 1, 1997, Charlotte L. Glover, review of The Portable Western Reader, p. 130; November 15, 1999, Cynde Bloom Lahey, review of Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief, p. 69; December 1, 2000, Nancy P. Shires, review of The Nature of Generosity, p. 132; July 1, 2003, Faye A. Chadwell, review of The Best Short Stories of William Kittredge, p. 127; October 1, 2006, Ken St. Andre, review of The Willow Field, p. 58.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 11, 1984, Kristiana Gregory, "Soft Cover," p. 12; July 5, 1992, John Schulian, "Regrets Like Rain," p. 1; February 11, 1996, Daniel Duane, "How the West Might Someday Be Won," p. 2.

Nation, September 30, 2002, Philip Connors, "Not So Pretty Horses, Too," p. 32.

New England Review and Bread Loaf Quarterly, winter, 1989, Christopher Merrill, review of Owning It All.

New York Times, June 8, 1992, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, "A Decline and Fall in the Northwest," p. C16.

Publishers Weekly, May 22, 1987, John Mutter, review of Owning It All, p. 71; December 18, 1995, review of Who Owns the West?, p. 45; December 18, 1995, review of Who Owns the West?, p. 45; June 2, 1997, review of The Portable Western Reader, p. 64; October 23, 2000, review of The Nature of Generosity, p. 64; August 14, 2006, review of The Willow Field, p. 178.

Reference & Research Book News, May 1, 2001, review of The Nature of Generosity, p. 63.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), December 18, 1988, Ginny Merriam, "A Vast Collection of Writing from a Land That Writers Love," p. 4; July 12, 1992, Jane Smiley, "An American Family in the Landscape," p. 7.

Washington Post Book World, May 31, 1992, Noel Perrin, "Back in the Saddle," p. 3; October 22, 2006, Ron Charles, "Wild, Wild West: A Young Cowboy Chases His Destiny," p. 7.