|
 William Kittredge became a major cultural voice with his 1987 collection of essays Owning It All, which mapped the emotional terrain of the modern West. His memoir, Hole In The Sky, was marked by questionings, qualifications, and wonderings. His task was introspection, the examined life, a cutting away of rationalizations, self-dissection. He explained from the outset that his was a memoir of failure. The book describes his childhood and youth farming in the Warner Valley of southeastern Oregon, up to the point when he is thrust out of that isolated insular Eden.
In his book of short stories We Are Not In This Together, and book of essays Who Owns The West?, Kittredge pursued and dismantled the Western moral code that emphasized independence, hierarchy, private ownership, and resource exploitation. Kittredge’s The Nature of Generosity, published by Knopf in December 2000, is a wide-ranging inquiry. He ponders how to create physical and spiritual sustainability of all creatures. He touches on the cave-paintings at Lacaus, France, the World Bank, Twelfth Century Italian mosaics, and the life of Frederico Garcia Lorca. The goal is to reconcile the needs of people with the needs of places and creatures. The Nature of Generosity, Kittredge says, "proceeds more like a dance than an argument."
Bill Kittredge grew up on a cattle ranch in southeastern Oregon, farmed until he was 35, studied in the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa, and became the Regents Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Montana until he retired in the spring of 1997.
Kittredge has held a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford (1973-74), received two Writing Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1974, 1982), and two Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Awards for Excellence (1984, 1987). He was winner of the Montana Governor's Award for the Arts (1986), co-winner of the Montana Committee for the Humanities Award for Humanist of the Year (1989), and winner of the PEN West Award for non-fiction book of the year (1992). He was co-winner of the Neil Simon Award from American Playhouse for his work on the script for Heartland, coeditor of The Last Best Place: a Montana Anthology, and co-producer of the film A River Runs Through It. In June, 1993, he was elected to the American Academy of Achievement, and in October of 1994, he was a co-winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities' prize for service to the humanities.
Kittredge has published in more than fifty magazines and newspapers. He co-authored the nine novels in the Cord series of Westerns, published short fiction in two collections, The Van Gogh Field and Other Stories and We Are Not In This Together, and published two collections of essays, Owning It All and Who Owns the West. With Annick Smith, he edited The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology.
Bibliography
Blake, Tupper Ansel, Madeleine Graham Blake, and William Kittredge. Balancing Water:
Restoring the Klamath Basin. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.
Hanson, David T., Wendell Berry, Mark Dowie, and William Kittredge. Waste Land:
Meditations on a Ravaged Landscape. New York: Aperture, 1997.
Hartman, Monte, and William Kittredge. America's 100th Meridian: A Plains Journey.
Plains histories. Lubbock TX: Texas Tech UP, 2005.
Kittredge, William. The Best Short Stories of William Kittredge. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 2003.
---. Hole in the Sky: A Memoir. New York: Knopf-Random House, 1992.
---. The Nature of Generosity. New York: Knopf, 2000.
---. Owning It All: Essays. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1987.
---. The Portable Western Reader. New York: Penguin Books, 1997.
---. Southwestern Homelands. National Geographic directions. Washington, D.C.:
National Geographic, 2002.
---. Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief. Berkeley: Milkweed, 1999.
---. The Van Gogh Field and Other Stories. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1978.
---. We Are Not in this Together: Stories. The Graywolf short fiction series. Port
Townsend: Graywolf, 1984.
---. Who Owns the West? San Francisco: Mercury House, 1996.
Kittredge, William, and Allen Morris Jones. The Best of Montana's Short Fiction.
Guilford CN: Lyons, 2004.
Kittredge, William, and Steven M. Krauzer. Stories into Film. New York: Harper
and Row, 1979.
Kittredge, William, and John Smart. Montana Spaces: Essays and Photographs in
Celebration of Montana. New York: Nick Lyons Books, 1988.
Kittredge, William, and Annick Smith. The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology.
A Montana centennial book. Helena: Montana Historical Society Press, 1988.
Back to Keynote Speakers.
Last updated july 7, 2006.
|
