It was a long time ago, we were both much younger and I've never had a lot of short stories published as a result.

But teaching is more than learning how to do something. It also is the inspiration the pupil gets from the teacher and Wallace Stegner was the best teacher I ever had.

I write this not so much to boast of it all (well, maybe a little) but to point out that the Los Altos History Museum is having an exhibition of things Stegner from now until June. Stegner lived nearby in Los Altos Hills and spent most of his teaching career at Stanford University.

And he wrote a lot of that for which he became famous in his little glassed cubicle office on the Stegner property at the end of South Fork Lane. There will be, so I understand, a replica of the cubicle at the museum.

Stegner won the Pulitzer Prize for literature (for Angle of Repose) and, although some folks thought he ought also to have been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature—he was at least as deserving as John Steinbeck in some eyes, including mine—he never made it.

But he did turn out a very large body of work: novels, non-fiction, short stories, essays, critical essays, environmental tracts, even studies of racial injustice in a time when that wasn't popular. He wrote almost to the end of his life, which came when he made a wrong left turn in New Mexico and collided with another car.

(One of his last words, according to someone, was "never rent a car in a strange town.")

But although a lot of the world remembers him as a writer, it's as a teacher that I'll always think of him. Among his famous students were Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Scott Truru and Larry McMurtry. But they were only part of those who studied with him over his 55-year career in teaching. And apparently most of them remember him with as much fondness as I do.

It's hard to say how he inspired his students. In writing classes, it was his custom to read a student's work without saying who had written it and then to invite criticism from other members of the class. The criticism had to be constructive. He quickly shut down anybody who was negative in what they had to say.

When all the others had spoken, he'd give his own view of the work in question and usually it was fair, balanced, helpful and instructive.

And that was pretty much how it was with the other parts of his teaching relationships. Once you were one of his students, you were always one of his students. Or at least that's how it was with me. I'd send him things I had written long after I graduated and he would take the time to send back a critical review, a friendly note and a brief report on where he was with what he was writing. Sometimes they were letters. Now and then they were postcards, but I could always be sure I would hear something from him when I wrote.

Now and then I was lucky enough to be able to visit him and Mary (Mrs. Stegner, who is still alive). He always welcomed me, although the visits had to come in the afternoons. Almost invariably he devoted the mornings to writing.

He had picked South Fork Lane as a place to live when Los Altos Hills was mostly empty hills because it was close to Stanford, but not too close, and he looked with disfavor on the rapid encroachment of suburbia on his few acres. Although he grew up in Salt Lake City (and wrote a lot about it in The Big Rock Candy Mountain and Recapitulation) he also felt at home in Vermont, where he and Mary often spent the summers.

But he always thought of himself as a Westerner and he tried very hard to carve out a place in literature for the West; a place he defined not just as California, but also the arid lands of the Great Basin, where water is scarce and human life is less populous than it has become on the Pacific Coast.

His books about the West include The Spectator Bird, The Hundredth Meridian and All the Little Live Things.

It seems to me that time has been good to him, and that even though he has passed on, his reputation and influence have continued to grow. I think he'd like that. I don't think he became vain, as some writers so with age, but he did to appreciate that he had done a good job with his life and career. He seemed satisfied with his life.

I remember when he was 80 when a group of us first- and second-year students gave a dinner in his honor and someone said, "Wally, if you're such a good teacher, how come you're famous and we're not?"

And he just smiled.

He knew he was not only a great writer, but also a great teacher. Otherwise we would not have been there.