If you listened to the last episode of Citations Needed, you heard that the CIA funneled money into into cultural institutions like the Iowa Writers Workshop and the Paris Review to win the cultural war against communism. Much of this led to the emphasis on first-person writing and a focus on individual experience.
I don't know about you comrades, but I got Ds throughout secondary (high school) in English. I fucking hated 20th century lit. Are there any pretentious and overly individualistic writers that you blame on the CIA?
I think it's interesting they chose Stegner. While his collected short stories focus on small scale evocative experiences, The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a scathing critique of America and the frontier mentality. Whether Stegner meant it to be a critique, however, is another story.