Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

Angle of Repose tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need, Ward is nonetheless embarking on a search of monumental proportions—to rediscover his grandmother, now long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life.

 

Wallace Stegner has said of his epic novel, "It's perfectly clear that if every writer is born to write one story, that's my story." It is a testament to the power of Stegner's prose and vision that Angle of Repose, winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, can be appreciated as America's story as well. Based on the correspondence of the little-known 19th century writer, Mary Hallock Foote, the novel's heroes represent opposing but equally strong strains of the American ideal. 

557 pages. (January 1971)

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Lit Guide from LitLovers.

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Angle of Repose at goodreads

 

Review from Kirkus Reviews

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AudioBook Review at salon

"A Perspective on Wallace Stegner" from VQR
"Tangle of Repose" from The LA Times

 

Wallace Stegner Collection at the University of Utah (C-SPAN Cities Tour): 

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