Richard Scowcroft, 85; Novelist Headed Writing Program at Stanford

Richard P. Scowcroft, a scholarly novelist who followed the late Wallace Stegner as director of Stanford University’s prestigious creative writing program, has died. He was 85.

Scowcroft, who nurtured such successful writers as best-selling legal affairs novelist Scott Turow, died Oct. 7 in his home on the Stanford campus.

Sometimes semiautobiographical and usually involving coming-of-age struggles, Scowcroft’s half-dozen or so novels from the 1940s to the 1970s include “Children of the Covenant,” “First Family,” “A View of the Bay,” “Wherever She Goes,” “The Ordeal of Dudley Dean” and “Back to Fire Mountain.”

The earliest novels, a Times reviewer wrote in 1955, demonstrated “his command of technique, his ability to write directly, thoughtfully and vividly, [and] his knowledge that a novel, if it is worth anything at all, must be about people.”

Turow, who endowed the Richard Scowcroft Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford, told the San Francisco Chronicle that Scowcroft was “undervalued” as a novelist in his own right but that “his gifts as a teacher of creative writing are beyond dispute. He knew exactly when to bring you yet closer to being a good writer.”

Born in Ogden, Utah, Scowcroft earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Utah and a master’s and doctorate in English from Harvard.

After teaching a year at Harvard, Scowcroft joined the Stanford faculty as an assistant professor of English in 1947. He soon began working with Stegner to shape the university’s creative writing program, including editing and publishing periodic anthologies of students’ work.

“It should be said that whatever the writing program added to the English department and the university was at least half [Scowcroft’s] contribution,” Stegner once noted.

Scowcroft succeeded Stegner--who founded the program and ran it for more than 20 years--as director in 1971, when Turow was among the creative writing fellows.

The educator and writer is survived by sons Richard Mark Scowcroft of Washington, D.C., Roger Scowcroft of Salt Lake City and Philip Scowcroft of Middletown, Conn.; and two grandsons.

University officials said a memorial service will be planned for January.

Memorial donations can be sent either to the Richard Scowcroft Prize for Prose: Development Office, University of Utah, 201 President’s Circle, Salt Lake City, UT 84112, or to Stanford University’s Richard Scowcroft Fellowship in Creative Writing, Attn. Memorial Gifts, 326 Galves St., Stanford, CA 94305.