‘Angle of Repose’ by Wallace Stegner
I read this novel soon after it came out in 1971 (and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972) and, if I bothered to organize my books, it would definitely belong on my shelf of favorites. The novel is about a real historian Lyman Ward and Stegner (1909-1993) based it on the letters of author Mary Hallock Foote. Some say he shouldn’t have used actual passages from her work. He says he had permission to do so. The controversy remains amongst scholars.
Wikipedia notes that “The title, seemingly taken from Foote’s writings, is an engineering term for the angle at which soil finally settles after, for example, being dumped from a mine as tailings.”
From the Publisher
Stegner in 1969An American masterpiece and iconic novel of the West by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner—a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past.
Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need. Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture, he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him.
The Atlantic Monthly called the novel a “Cause for celebration…A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction.”
About the Author“Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.” – Amazon Listing
