William Kittredge - 1932
By Ethan Kanning
William Kittredge is a renowned author and winner of the 1994 Charles Frankel Prize. He was later invited to the White House for a black-tie dinner. The Charles Frankel prize is awarded to citizens who through their scholarship, writing and leadership have enriched the nation. He has been called by literary critics, "the modern western short story writer par excellence".
Kittredge was born in Portland, Oregon, on August 14, 1932. His family ranched in the Warner Valley in Southeastern Oregon. His grandfather had built the ranch. As a child, Kittredge's dad gave up law school to work the family land. Kittredge grew up knowing that "nothing is more important than self." In 1954, he attended Oregon State University and earned a degree in general agriculture. Later in 1969, he received a M.F.A. from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Then he began his teaching career at the University of Missoula. He teaches English and Creative Writing. He has taught at the University of Missoula for over a quarter century, and lived in Missoula since 1969.
Kittredge's writing has appeared in Harper's, Outside, and other nationally known magazines and journals. He writes in his apartment, in a spare bedroom rigged up as an office. He gets his ideas from thinking about his experiences, reading related material, traveling, talking to others, and listening to the ways people reveal themselves in conversation.
William Kittredge enjoys traveling, reading, writing, and playing golf. The things that he learned through this job affect everything he does and writes. He enjoys reading first rate fiction by authors like Faulkner and Marquez. Poets he enjoys reading are Mary Oliver and Robert Hass. He also likes a lot of wide-ranging and heavy non-fiction like Development as Freedom by Armatya Sen. She was the 1998 Nobel Prize winner in economics. William Kittredge writes in Montana because his "GOOD luck" got him a job here. He said that writers could live anywhere and still publish, but he loves living in Montana.
William Kittredge has written many books, articles, essays, books, memoirs, and meditations. He has also co-authored multiple books and edited numerous others. He has edited 23 anthologies of Western Literature. One of the most well known books he co-edited is The Last Best Place . He co-producedA River Runs Through It. He also co-edited and wrote an introduction to The Portable Western Reader (1997). He also edited Montana Spaces: Essays in Celebration of Montana. Some of his more famous works include:
The Van Gogh Field (1969)
We Are Not In This Together (1984)
Owning it all (1987) an essay
Hole in the Sky a memoir
Balancing Water: Restoring Klamath Basin (1996)
Who owns the West (1996)
The WPA Guide to 1930's Montana (1994)
This essay was submitted by a student of Steve Gardiner, a teacher of Billings Senior High School in Billings, Montana.