Panelist - William Kittredge

William Kittredge Photo by Marion Ettlinger

WILLIAM KITTREDGE grew up on the MC Ranch in southeastern Oregon, farmed until he was 35, studied in the Writer's Workshop at the University of Iowa, and was 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 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, among them the Atlantic, Harper's , Esquire, Time, Newsweek, TriQuarterly, Outside, Anteaus, The Paris Review, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. 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.

In addition to his other work, Kittredge has completed a novel Sixty Million Buffalo (which he reports is finished, and "maybe dead"), and two books are in progress--a book about golf called Reasons to Play (Lyons Press) and Going South, a study of the American southwest under contract to National Geographic. An 8,000 word essay to accompany the photography of Monte Hartman, in a book called American Heartline, focused on life along the 100th Meridian, is also currently under consideration.

Bibliography:
Cord Series (co-author of nine Westerns), Ballentine Books
Balancing Water: Restoring the Klamath Basin (a study of the watershed community forming in the Klamath Basin of southern Oregon, done with photographers Tupper Ansel Blake and Madeliene Blake), University of California Press, 2000
The Nature of Generosity, Knopf, 2000 (to be republished by Vintage in November, 2001)
Taking Care: Thoughts on Storytelling and Belief (a "Credo" book), Milkwood Editions, 1999
The Portable Western Reader, Viking/Penquin, 1997
Who Owns the West (essays), Mercury House, 1996
A Hole in the Sky (memoir), Knopf, 1992
Owning It All (essays), Graywolf, 1987
The Last Best Place: a Montana Anthology (co-editor), Grove/Pequot
We Are Not In This Together (short fiction), Graywolf, 1984
The Van Gogh Field and Other Stories (short fiction), University of Missouri Press, 1979)

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