Angle of reposebyWallace Earle Stegner

Angle of Repose (1971) is a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winning book by Wallace Stegner. The book is often considered to be Stegner's finest work of fiction. The ambitious novel is about a wheelchair-bound historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents.

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Long considered by most critics as Stegner's fiction "masterwork", Angle ofRepose is a book quite as ambitious in its own way as The Big Rock Candy Mountain. Like the 1943 novel, Angle of Repose seeks to characterize a major part of the western experience by showing it through the eyes,actions, and feelings of individual human beings. And, like the relationshiship between Bo and Elsa Mason in the earlier novel, one of the book's basic themes is the emotional and psychological tug-of-war between a man who seeks his future in a long western wandering after the main chance and a woman who yearns for stability, gentleness, and permanence of place."It's perfectly clear," Stegner remarked after the book's publication,"that if every writer is born to write one story, that's my story." But there is a lot more going on in Angle of Respose. Stegner is also trying to discover what it is that holds a marriage together, how disparate and even contradictory individuals can eventually find an "angle of repose" that enables a relationship to endure even when it is has been torn nearly asunder--and, above all, he is trying to find those connections that bind us to the past and help to make us what we are. A lot to do, and to accomplish it, Stegner creates a narrator/protagonist named Lyman Ward, a historian who is attempting to write a book based on the letters and other writings of his grandmother, Susan Ward, a writer and painter from the artistic warrens of the east who had been persuaded to marry a roving mining engineer, Oliver Ward. The story of that marriage,as it moves from place to place from Colorado to Mexico to Idaho to GrassValley, California, is at the core of the novel and is itself an epic that plunges its characters into beautifully drawn landscapes riven by the kinds of upheavals that one rarely--perhaps never--expects to find in western fiction. This is not the West as romance, but the West as reality,from the raw exploitation of industrial hard rock mining to the burgeoning, if fruitless, hopes of irrigation development, and for what it gives us of that reality alone, the book is a triumph. But as revelatory drama, the complex strands of the relationship between Susan and Oliver Ward transcend their own time by becoming inextricably tangled with the often tortured complications of their grandson's life. One-legged and half-paralyzed, Lyman Ward is confined to a wheelchairand even as he tells the story of his grandparents's long hegira, he struggles to find in the intimate details of his family's past some way to come to terms with his physical and emotional travail, his estrangement from his son, his uncertainties about his own marriage. Finally, he seeks some kind of reconciliation with an age (the late Sixties and early Seventies) whose violence, intelletual laziness, and callow rejection of history and civility offends every bone in his crippled body. In large part, Angle of Repose is based on the real-life letters and life of Mary Hallock Foote, an artist and writer who was the basis for Susan Ward. On his dedication page, Stegner thanks the Foote family for the"loan" of their ancestors, but a misunderstanding between Stegner and the family over precisely how he intended to use the Mary Hallock Foote letters (for which he had received the family's permission) led to considerable discord after the book was published--including charges of "plagiarism" from a couple of critics. The charge cut him deeply, even though it was baseless (his use of the letters comprises less than 10 percent of the book), taking some of the savor out of the fact that Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. -- T.H. Watkins


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• Grass Valley
• New Almaden
• Santa Cruz
• Leadville
• Michoacán
• On the bough
• The canyon
• The mesa
• The Zodiac Cottage.