“What we find in these stories, over and over again, is talk of home, lost or sought after, or in some conditional way discovered or rediscovered—the possibility of a coherent life in a last best place” — William Kittredge, “The Last Best Place"
A novelist, essayist, teacher and “dean of Western literature.”
A raconteur, astute critic and the one who first called Montana, “The Last Best Place.”
Fellow writers and friends all remembered the various facets of the life and work of William “Bill” Kittredge, after his death on Friday at age 88.
As a writer, he was best known for his 1992 memoir about his youth on an Oregon ranch, “Hole in the Sky,” and a collection of essays, “Owning it All.” He co-created “The Last Best Place,” a 1,200-page anthology of Montana literature, from the earliest Indigenous storytelling to the present. He coined the title phrase himself, which has become an unofficial state motto that he fought to keep from a private trademark.
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As a 30-year emeritus professor, he helped build the reputation of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana, mentoring generations of authors.
“He needs to be celebrated for the way he encouraged the Western voice and writing about Montana at a time when it wasn’t the most popular thing to do,” said writer and friend Lois Welch. He developed “a literary West” as opposed to the Hollywood movies that defined the region in the popular imagination.
“He was committed to demolishing the myth that kind of kept this strength and beauty of the West from being evident,” Welch said.
His longtime partner, the writer and filmmaker Annick Smith, said Kittredge’s health began to decline this fall. A “voracious reader” until the end, he continued to have books delivered during the pandemic and was working on another memoir of his life as a writer, which she is helping to complete.
“I promised that I would continue to edit it,” she said.
Kittredge’s voice remains “important in environmental issues, and water issues, and [he was] a spokesperson with a connection with the land and preservation of the natural world, and the animals and people who lived here,” Smith said.
A big man with a big presence and a huge laugh, “he had huge influence on his students and other writers,” Smith said.
Here in Missoula, he was a member of a famed group of writers, including the poet Richard Hugo and novelists James Crumley and James Welch, Rick Demarinis, all of whom are now gone. Lois Welch remembered him as a wonderful raconteur in that “hugely social” scene in places like the Milltown Bar and Eddie’s Club (now Charlie B’s), and was a regular at the Depot until the pandemic.
While some of those tales can be left to bar-room legend, Kittredge leaves behind the stories he published in his potent books.
“His sentences, you can just take them and read them, and they make you feel stronger as you say them,” Welch said, adding: “That’s his talent. You don’t learn that, you have that to start with.”
Deirdre “Dee” McNamer, a former student, novelist and recently retired creative writing professor said that “sentence by sentence, it was always first rate.” Beyond the prose, though, “He wasn’t afraid to care about things.”
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The new memoir will start at the family ranch in Warner Valley, Oregon, and wind through his early days studying agriculture at Oregon State University, and his decision to pursue literature at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he earned his MFA.
Then, in 1969, he moved to Missoula for a post in the UM Creative Writing Program.
Writing is a risky career to undertake, Smith said, and teaching afforded stability that, combined with his love for the area, kept him here. In a 1989 interview with the Missoulian, he said the city afforded him “a hugely privileged life, not possible much of anywhere else for a man with my income.”
He stayed at UM through to his retirement in 1997, and his death signifies “the end of an era,” said current director Judy Blunt.
In 2012, he returned to UM as the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Kittredge Writer fellowship, which brings authors from around the country to the Environmental Studies Program.
Later, he had misgivings about the legacy of cattle ranching and wasn’t afraid to express it. “He could be unsubtle, and I think that caused heartburn,” said his son, Brad Kittredge.
Smith believes that some consider his teaching to be the largest part of his legacy.
McNamer said Kittredge had “a really good ear, and a really good eye for original, exceptional, interesting writing” as they selected candidates, and so “determined the quality of the student population in the program.”
He taught students such as Neil McMahon, Ralph Beer and McNamer, too. This week, she received an email from Andrew Sean Greer, a UM MFA graduate who won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for “Less” in 2018. Greer said Kittredge was pivotal in helping him turn away from cleverness and toward emotion and storytelling.
Lois Welch, a fellow emeritus professor, said that Kittredge’s literary judgment was “just remarkable,” whether he was advocating for people to read “One Hundred Years of Solitude” or helping fellow writers, including James Welch.
He showed Kittredge an early draft of his first novel, “Winter in the Blood.”
“He taught Jim everything he needed to know about dialogue in one night,” Lois said. A conversation needs be organic, with bumper car disruptions, and volleys and tangents, she said.
Welch took that advice and ran with it, "ever grateful,” she said.
McNamer believed he had “a musician’s sense of what a piece of fiction might be missing.” He once told her that one of her short stories needed “one more beat” at the finale, which stumped her at the time.
“In the end, I think I found that beat that was missing,” she said.
Despite of his love of the West, Smith said Kittredge shouldn’t be thought of as a regional author. He earned recognitions such as a National Humanities Award, presented to him by President Bill Clinton in 1994. His work was published by major houses, and he counted among his friends non-Montana figures like Raymond Carver, who edited his story collection “We Are Not In This Together.” Tributes from writers from around the country have been flowing in.
Asked about the issue of regionalism in a 1999 interview with the Missoula Independent, Kittredge said, “I really don’t think we should try to be regional, but we shouldn’t resist being regional either. Nobody can be more regional than Proust; nobody can be more regional than Tolstoy; nobody can be more regional than Virginia Woolf. They’re specifically set in a whole emotional, physical setting of one kind or another — but at the same time I think that you want to reach out to universal things, too, the things that really apply to everybody.”
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“The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology” was published in 1988, Montana's centennial, after four years of effort.
An assembled team — Kittredge, Smith, Bill Bevis, Mary Clearman Blew and William Lang —wanted to mark the occasion with a new collection of Western literature that was broader than the myth, that included “the whole history of storytelling in Montana,” Smith said.
Different editors handling different sections — Welch, for instance, shepherded the chapter on Indigenous writing.
Kittredge thought up the title phrase over drinks at Chico Hot Springs, a variation on Abraham Lincoln’s phrase, “the last best hope of Mankind.” After rejections from New York publishing world, the best-selling response was a “pleasant surprise,” Smith said, with multiple printings and acknowledgment far outside of the state.
In his later years, he read every day but found little time for other media. He's left a legacy in Montana filmmaking.
As a consulting writer, with Smith as executive producer, they created “Heartland,” a 1979 film about the lesser-told experiences of a woman settler in the early 1900s. (Beth Ferris, a Missoula writer, wrote the screenplay and co-produced.)
Smith and Kittredge worked hard to bring Norman Maclean’s novella, “A River Runs Through It,” to the screen, thought it was eventually scooped up by Robert Redford, with the duo as co-producers. He was close with Smith’s children, Alex and Andrew, who pursued careers in film and based two of their films on work by Montana writers — Welch’s “Winter in the Blood” and David Quammen’s “Walking Out.”
He and Smith were married in January after decades together. Kittredge had two previous marriages, and leaves behind two children, Brad Kittredge and Karen Zarosinkski, and their families. Brad, who grew up in Warner Valley, said his father was gregarious, fascinated with storytelling and often described as “larger than life,” with a presence that could fill the room.
Because gatherings like the ones that Kittredge enjoyed aren’t safe now, Smith is planning a memorial sometime after COVID when there can be a proper, in-person tribute for the writer who McNamer called “an institution.”