Bernard De Voto

(1897 - 1955)

A defender of American public lands and a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian for his book about the beaver fur trade, Across the Wide Missouri, Bernard De Voto was born in Utah in 1897, lived for many years in Massachusetts, and wrote often about the American West. From 1935 until his death in 1955, he wrote the Easy Chair column in Harper’s Magazine. “Nobody took a neutral position on Benny De Voto,” wrote his friend Wallace Stegner, “any more than he took a neutral position on anything or anyone.”