Angle of Repose (novel)

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Angle of Repose
First edition cover
Author	Wallace Stegner
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Novel
Publisher	Doubleday
Publication date	1971
Media type	print (hardback & paperback)
ISBN	ISBN 0-14-016930-X

For the engineering term, see Angle of repose.

Angle of Repose is a 1972 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Wallace Stegner 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. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. The novel is directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. Stegner's use of substantial passages of Foote's actual letters as correspondence from his fictional character Susan Burling Ward caused a continuing controversy ^[1][2].

Contents 1 Plot summary 2 Fictional Characters in "Angle of Repose" 2.1 Lyman Ward 2.2 Susan Burling Ward 2.3 Oliver Ward 3 Historical Characters in "Angle of Repose" 4 References

[edit] Plot summary

The title is an engineering term for the angle at which soil finally settles after, for example, being dumped from a mine as tailings. It seems to describe the loose wandering of the Ward family as they try to carve a civilized existence in the west and, hopefully, return to the east as successes. The story is a series of Oliver's hopeful struggles on various mining, hydrology and construction engineering jobs, and Susan's adaptation and struggle to support him.

The book is given more complexity by having Lyman Ward narrate from his wheelchair a century after the fact. It is clear we are reading Lyman's interpretation of the story, a literary device that encourages readers to be more skeptical of what they are told. Some of the disappointments of his life, including his divorce, color his interpretation of his grandparent's story. Toward the end of the novel, he gives up on his original ambition for a complete biography of his grandmother. It is as if he picked up the disappointment from his ancestors or, perhaps, is drawn to focus more closely on his own mortality and what he can accomplish himself.

Stegner's use of Mary Hallock Foote's historical letters gives the novel's locations—Leadville, New Almaden, Idaho, and Mexico—an authentic feel one doesn't usually^{[citation needed]} find in westerns; the letters also give the Wards' struggles with the environment, shady businessmen, politicians and other dangers a human feel. In Lyman's interaction with (and rantings about) 1960s culture, we get yet another historical dimension to the story (Lyman's son teaches at Berkeley and a counterculture daughter of a neighbor helps transcribe the tapes).

[edit] Fictional Characters in "Angle of Repose"

[edit] Lyman Ward

Lyman Ward is the narrator of the book, a divorced amputee with a debilitating disease that is slowly "petrifying" him. A retired history professor, in the early 1970s he is dictating the book, the biography of his grandmother Susan Burling Ward, to tape. Fiercely independent, he lives alone in the house where Susan Ward died and in which he spent time as a child. As he dictates, he is fighting off intrusions into his life by his son and other well-meaning people who are concerned by his being alone when he is wheelchair-bound.

[edit] Susan Burling Ward

In her youth, Susan Burling (the character based on Mary Hallock Foote) was a promising writer and artist connected with some of the leading lights in New York culture. When she and Oliver Ward met and fell in love, she left the promise of New York to follow him, expecting to return. The contrast between her life in the American west of the second half of the 1800s to that of her best friend in New York is a constant thread through the novel. Lyman depicts her as frustrated by the loss of her writing/art career and disappointed with her family's position in life, but a strong character able to adjust to the circumstances.

[edit] Oliver Ward

Based on Mary's husband Arthur De Wint Foote, Oliver is a bright, straightforward, honest man who has focused on supporting the family he loves. A mining engineer, he moves all over the West following jobs to Colorado, California, Mexico, and Idaho. Sometimes he is on his own, but when he feels he can, he has his family join him—often in the most primitive of homes in the wildest of places. His honesty limits his progress in the rough world they find themselves trying to succeed in. Lyman sees a struggle between this limitation and Susan's desire to recreate some of the "culture" of the East that she gave up upon her marriage, a desire that can only be fulfilled if her husband makes a great deal of money.

[edit] Historical Characters in "Angle of Repose"

The novel is thickly populated with real, although minor, historical personages, giving further realism to the narrative. A "Who's Who" of American mining engineers and other western individuals of the late 1800s make their appearance, including John Wesley Powell, Clarence King, Samuel Franklin Emmons, Henry Janin, and Rossiter W. Raymond.

[edit] References

Awards
Preceded by no award given (1971) The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford by Jean Stafford (1970)	Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 1972	Succeeded by The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty