Author Turns Down Arts Medal in Protest

Author Wallace Stegner has turned down a White House medal to protest alleged censorship at the National Endowment for the Arts, he and U.S. officials said.

Stegner, 84, became the second prominent American artist to turn down a National Medal of Arts since the acting head of the National Endowment for the Arts announced that she would police the agency’s grant awards to artists to assure that their projects were suitable for “the widest possible audiences.”

Songwriter Stephen Sondheim disclosed earlier this month that he had turned down one of the medals, which were to be presented by President Bush to about a dozen prominent artists at a White House ceremony in July.

Anne-Imelda Radice, who became the arts agency’s acting chairwoman May 1, triggered a firestorm in the arts world when she overruled an agency advisory council’s recommendation to subsidize two art exhibits because they showed genitals.

Stegner, who won the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for his novel “Angle of Repose,” wrote the arts agency last week that he would not accept the award because of Radice’s new policy.

He wrote that he was “distressed by what has been done to the Endowment for the Arts by its congressional and administration enemies. . . .” Stegner said that he backed arts subsidies but added, “I also believe that support is meaningless, even harmful, if it restricts the imaginative freedom of those to whom it is given.”

NEA officials said that they were aware Stegner had written the letter but had not yet received it and would have no comment.