Stan Steiner

Historian, editor, and humorist, Stan Steiner spent a lifetime loving and writing about the American Southwest. In his thirty books, he sought not to destroy the many myths surrounding the land and its people, but rather to strip away the facade, the Hollywood and East Coast fantasies, to reveal the human beings beneath the myths. And real human beings, to Steiner, were somehow more real in the American West than anywhere else. The West, he believed, is a place where people are defined by the line at which Frederick Jackson Turners's frontier thesis becomes suddenly personal- -a relation among individuals, rather than an abstract theory in a historian's textbook. For Steiner, here was the dwelling place of the American soul in all its fabulous, strife-torn diversity.

Like many of those extolling the West, he was originally from the East. Steiner was born January 1, 1925, in a long-vanished, rural section of Brooklyn, New York--in those years a small farming community. His childhood passed there and in rural New Jersey before Steiner's parents, Austrian immigrants, moved to Manhattan. The shock of the city soon drove him West, to discover America.

Click here to hear an excerpt on Stan Steiner from Writing the Southwest.