If Ripton was Frost’s Vermont muse, Greensboro was Stegner’s. Stegner also took the title for his novel “Fire and Ice” (1941) from an eponymous Frost poem his novel “Crossing to Safety” (1987) riffs on a line in the Frost poem “I Could Give All to Time”: “But why declare / The things forbidden that while the Customs slept / I have crossed to Safety with?” Ner later recalled, the days were filled with lectures and manuscript swaps, the evenings with bourbon and laughter.įrost was known as a curmudgeon, but he liked Stegner, and, according to Benson, it’s likely that the younger writer’s encounters with Frost suffused Vermont with a “special glow” in his mind. Stegner’s initial application to Bread Loaf was rejected, but he later spent eight summers strolling its meadows and talking books with such writers as Eudora Welty, Truman Capote and Vermont poet Robert Frost, who lived in the nearby village of Ripton. It wasn’t until Stegner was earning graduate degrees at the University of Iowa in the early 1930s that he began to imagine himself attending Bread Loaf and hobnobbing with Ivy League literati. As a precocious teenager, he had attended the University of Utah while working odd jobs and covering amateur sports for a local newspaper. Benson says the writer’s early experiences here helped him to develop confidence and hone his literary voice.īread Loaf was a major change of scene for the young Stegner.
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