The son of an immigrant, Stan Steiner attended high school at the former Dutch Reform School in Flatbush, founded in 1637. "I didn't attend school much," he said. In fact, I was finally expelled because I got such high marks on examinations that the assistant principal insisted that I must have been cheating."
Steiner was ambivalent about school and called himself "a good scholar, but not a school scholar." During high school, he was a rare combination of football jock and intellectual, and remembered stopping at a book sale on his way home from football practice. The books were were selling for seventeen cents a pound, and he brought several before discovering they were the poetry of Shelly and Keats.
"I was elevated and exhilarated by them," he said. "And that created a problem that dogged me for a year. I couldn't tell my buddies on the football team that I was reading poetry. And it was a tussle between football and Shelley and Keats." The poets won eventually and he vividly recalled hanging up his green jersey with number 52 on its back for the last time, "much to the relief of my mother who was afraid that I would become a professional football player."
His father wanted him to take over his furniture manufacturing business but Steiner insisted she was going to write; his first novel had already been completed when he was twelve. "I decided that Huckleberry Finn was out of date, so I began writing an urban version. I was writing it at my desk when my grandmother came in to the room and took a look, saying, 'That's not homework,' and she tore it up. It was my first rejection."
The Spur Award winner first sold his work to the Saturday Review when he was 19. The book of poetry was researched by hitchhiking and riding freight trains across the country with a friend following high school graduation. "I wasn't bumming my way," he said. "I worked on cross country trucks and did almost anything to help get from one town to another." The result of his travels was his America, America, America, a love ballad.
Steiner worked at various jobs following graduation from the University of Wisconsin, including several yeas in his father's furniture factory, in printing shops and the New York Daily News in the production department. "But mostly, I didn't work to support my writing. My first wife worked to support my writing, and I had a pretty easy early success in the literary scene. But after a few years, I decided it was a farce, because I didn't know anything about life, so I quit the literary scene and spent ten years writing four books for myself--novels while working with longshoremen on the New York waterfront for seven or eight years. And I figured out in those ten years that I earned eight-two dollars for my writing, which came to about thirteen cents a week.
"In my young, idealistic, and pre-family days, I believed, as many young writers do that a writer must earn a living to write, but he must never write to earn a living. Of course, that was a long time ago. Nowadays, the only people who believe that are editors and publishers. Writers have gotten over that romanticism."
Steiner would sit before his well-worn Olympic manual typewriter for at least eight hours a day. often longer, until his untimely death in 1987. He once spent a marathon 72 hours without sleep while rewriting a television documentary script. "I think you have to write whenever you have to write. And that depends entirely on the individual, and the kind of writing he or she is doing So my schedule is dictated by that.
Vanishing White Man won him a Spur and took him two years to write. But he carried the story in his head for forty years before he began. "I'm a visual writer," he said. "I have to experience the people and the place before I can write about either. If I'm going to write about a rancher, I have to go visit his ranch to see what his operation is like, what his family is like, and the terrain. I have to see it, feel it, and become part of it.
"What I don't like about writing is getting published. If you could only be paid to write--earn a living at it and not worry about getting published, all these hypothetical things with editors and publishers, horrendous things with circulation and marketing could be avoided."
The feisty, husky-voiced author said few pleasures surpassed the enjoyment of his craft. "Maybe seeing the mountains gives me more pleasure than writing, or eating a good meal, or making love. But I do enjoy writing. It is a constant discovery of the world, and a discovery of myself."
When asked why he wrote, Steiner used the analogy of an aging rancher he interviewed near Stinking Springs, Oregon. Asked why he still ranched , "he looked me in the eye and said, 'Why do you write? It must be a force of habit.' When I asked him how he managed at the age of 75 to keep up with several thousand acres and a couple of hundred head of cattle, he said, 'My fatter always used to say to be a buckaroos, you had to be a little smarter than a cow.' Maybe that applies to writing somehow."
Steiner insisted that everything written in the West by a western writer is a western, regardless of subject matter. "Even though it's not a shoot-em up, or has nothing to do with cowboys and cows, and is miles from a bunkhouse or a corral, it's still a western because you can't live in the West and not be affected by it. I can't sit here and look out my window and see the Sangre deCristo Mountains and not be influenced by them."
Library research was always secondary in Steiner's more than 20 novels and nonfiction books. Traveling the area and interviewing people was all-important to his work. While writing Laruza, he completed 500 pages of text about New Mexico's small farming towns and villages, based on the work of sociologists and historians.
"Some of them were my friends, of whom were damned good but when I finished the five hundred pages, I thought, This is not the way the local people in those villages talk about their lives. There's something too esoteric and removed. "So I tore up the five hundred pages and threw them in the wastepaper basket, and began rewriting it over, basing it with the small farmer in the valley and his life, the way I had known his life to be for two or three decades. That's research for me. And when I finished the chapter and I gave it to him to read, he said, 'Stan, you got me just right. I'll give you an acre of land.' Best interview I ever did."
(Excerpted from Maverick Writers)
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