“The West began for Susan Burling on the last day of 1868,
more than a century ago” (23).

Lyman Ward is a fifty-eight-year-old retired professor who is suffering from a degenerative bone disease that has left him wheelchair-bound after having a leg amputated. Previously, he taught university-level history courses and wrote books and monographs about the Western frontier, but since his retirement he has faced a rough road. He has been confined for two years to a wheelchair, and he now views himself as “grotesque” and undergoing a “slow petrification” wherein he moves “like a piano on a dolly” while becoming “as rigid as a monument.” He has become a bourbon-drinking “gargoyle.” The inspration for Lyman came from Norman Foerster, Wallace Stegner’s dissertation adviser at the University of Iowa who came to Stanford to retire (Foerster was afflicted with a disease that paralyzed his legs). In the novel, Lyman is a fairly curmudgeonly, disgruntled sort of fellow who is living off his annuities –though to be fair he is also introspective and solemn at times– but, writing in 1970, he has grown to thoroughly despise the ascendant social activist movements of the 1960s. For example, he fears the proponents of People’s Park in Berkeley are just a bunch of thoughtless agitators who wish to hopelessly remake the world anew. He also laments that his son Rodman has become a “Berkeley radical” –or a sociologist who believes the past cannot teach us anything new because “the past has been ended and the family has been broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair” (6). Lyman wrestles with how to treat the idea of history: to either embrace the conservative deification of all things past, or else side with the progressive historicist viewpoint which is often morally dismissive of history. Either way, both perspectives are forced to confront the shaky foundations of their ideology and the sheer gravitas of history that weighs down their claims through the lens of modern sensibilities.     

“Like other Berkeley radicals, he is convinced that the post-industrial post-Christian world is worn out, corrupt in its inheritance, helpless to create by evolution the social and political institutions, the forms of personal relations, the conventions, moralities, and systems of ethics (insofar as these are indeed necessary) appropriate to the future. Society being thus paralyzed, it must be pried loose. He, Rodman Ward, culture hero born fully armed from this history-haunted skull, will be happy to provide blueprints, or perhaps ultimatums and manifestoes, that will save us and bring on a life of true freedom. The family too. Marriage and the family as we have known them are becoming extinct. He is by Paul Goodman out of Margaret Mead. He sits in with the sit-inners, he will reform us malgré our teeth, he will make his omelet and be damned to the broken eggs. Like the Vietnam commander, he will regretfully destroy our village to save it” (7).    

Personally, Lyman is estranged from his wife, Ellen Hammond. She serves as a ghostly figure throughout the novel who never actually appears except in the form of a looming fearful presence in Lyman’s mind –she is mentioned by Rodman once when he describes her as wanting to apologize to Lyman, and she also memorably appears in a rather terrifying nightmare Lyman experiences near the end of the book. Why is she such a domineering presence in Lyman’s mind? Previously, Lyman had discovered Ellen was having an affair before she promptly abandoned him around the time of his physical deterioration, though we never actually hear her side of the story and we are left to wonder how reliable a narrator Lyman might truly be. But their failed marriage casts a shadow over the rest of the novel as Lyman embarks on a journey delving deep into his family’s past in an effort to learn from past transgressions and tragedies.  

Since becoming wheelchair-bound, Lyman has retreated to his family home the “Zodiac Cottage” on twelve acres in Grass Valley where he has been obsessively compiling a detailed biography of his famous grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, a 19^th century freewheeling artist and Quaker lady of high principles who is a descendant of Milton merchants and farmers on the Hudson in New York. She leads a fascinating life through some of the major events of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, making her way from the cultured mecca of New York City to the burgeoning edge of civilization in the American West. Throughout the novel, Susan’s intentions are scrutinized by Lyman as his grandmother engages acts that seem to defy modern demands for labels and definitions –she freely has an ambiguous lesbianic romance and lifelong friendship with Augusta in New York –“The twentieth century, by taking away the possibility of innocence, has made their sort of friendship unlikely; it gets inhibited or is forced into open sexuality” (24)—as well as her sudden decision to marry Oliver Ward, an engineer who is headed westward where he becomes ensconced in various grand construction projects throughout the Western United States. He represents the tension that Susan feels between the cultured East and the rough-and-tumble West. Oliver has a quiet, protective nature; he is neither pioneer nor privateer but “simply an honest man. His gift was not for money-making and the main chance. He was a builder, not a raider” (206). He leads his young family from New Almaden in California across numerous locales over any years to places like Colorado, Mexico, Idaho, and beyond. Even though money is tight and his financial success is limited, Susan manages to maintain a successful career as a writer and artist, submitting her works to various popular magazines. As a result, she has left behind a substantial paper trail of her life and her grandson, Lyman, is now able to pore over Susan’s old papers, books, reminiscences, pictures, and letters that were kept by Augusta’s daughter after Augusta died. Each morning, Lyman continues his work delving into these recovered writings with the help of his caretaker Ada and her bold commune-dwelling daughter, Shelly Rasmussen, who serves as Lyman’s typist.

Why has Lyman devoted his life to writing about his grandparents? What is he hoping to achieve with this project? He gives us a few clues peppered throughout the text. He says: “I’d like to live in their clothes a while, if only so I don’t have to live in my own” (6). He describes himself as a “historical pseudo-Fate” as he explores –and indeed even praises– the life of his grandmother. After living in a studio flat on 15^th Street in New York with her secret romantic lover, Augusta, Susan is devastated when Augusta becomes engaged to their mutual friend and a potential suitor for Susan, Thomas Hudson, “a man of taste, intelligence, and integrity” who was “one of the group of New York liberals who at various times cleaned up the Grant pigpen and put down Tammany Hall” (48). Despondent over the loss of both Augusta and Thomas, Susan somewhat haphazardly leaves the East and marries Oliver, the young engineer she met years earlier and with whom she developed a vague “understanding” five years prior. She and her new husband, Oliver Ward, make the harsh journey westward, leaving behind the grimy city of New York for a wild new frontier –interestingly enough, in 1868 when Susan was 21, New York is described as a crowded metropolis filled with dingy warehouses and absent today’s familiar landmarks like the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. New York was not yet even the world of Edith Wharton.

From here, while traveling westward, the story becomes an elegant, richly woven travelogue. For example, Susan mentions the single Stock Market building in Omaha, and she writes of feeling “depressed by the repetitive ugly barren little towns across the sod house country” with “lonely little clusters of settlers’ houses with the great monotonous waves of land stretching for miles around them, that make my heart ache for the women who live there. They stand in the house door as the train whirls past, and I wonder if they feel the hopelessness of their exile?” (68). The hot and dusty ride leads them to a mercury mine in New Almaden, “an ancient and famous mine that had furnished mercury for the reduction of the gold of the whole Gold Rush” (60). Here, Susan is exposed to a world of Mexican and Chinese laborers, huts and haciendas, poor miners and rich San Francisco capitalists. But troubles in the mine lead Oliver to abruptly quit and pursue a new cement business in Santa Cruz (which leads Lyman to complain about the overuse of cement in paving over the wild, untamed West, while also bemoaning modern socialist movements like the IWW as well as unions like the Western Federation of Miners or the United Mine Workers). However, the struggle for stable work in this field brings Oliver to Deadwood, a raw Black Hills gulch recently stolen from the Sioux, where Custer’s cavalry had been killed only two years earlier, and where the Sioux had been forced behind reservation fences or into exile in Canada. Oliver is employed by the rising magnate George Hearst, but the whole project winds up being riddled with claim jumpers and crooked managers. The economic insecurity of the 1870s also reignites anti-Chinese riots and it brings forward calls to deport Chinese labor (per usual, it is the immigrants who face the full brunt of scorn and blame for nativist economic anxieties). The next engineering project sends Oliver to Colorado and then Mexico before he embarks on a lengthy irrigation development near Boise, Idaho.

As we follow along on this rambling journey, Wallace Stegner challenges our inherited stereotypes about the Old West –especially Hollywood Western stereotypes which portray the West as a land of lone gunslingers, wide open space, pure freedom, rugged individualism, and a moralistic of heroes and villains. Instead, in Angle of Repose Stegner confronts and interrogates these cliches by offering a racially diverse panorama of a vast landscape where scammers and voracious investors lurk around every corner, and where good-natured men like Oliver Ward are eagerly exploited by the owners of this myth of rugged individualism. Consider the following several quotations taken from various sections of the book, each describing the West in a new way:  

“There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, where in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fisted bosses. Another is that it was rough, ready, and unkempt, and ribald about anything not as unkempt as itself, whereas in fact there was never at time or place where gentility, especially female gentility, was more respected. Not if it was the real thing…” (139).

“The West of my grandparents, I have to keep reminding others and myself, is the early West, the last home of the freeborn American. It is all owned in Boston and Philadelphia and New York and London. The freeborn American who works for one of those corporations is lucky if he does not have a family, for then he has an added option: he can afford to quit if he feels like it” (160).

“…under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization” (248).

“The country, as distinguished from its improvements and its people, is beautiful – a vast sage plain that falls in great steps from the mountains to the canyon of the Snake… It is a place where silence closes about you after the bustle of the train, where a soft, dry wind from great distances hums through the telephone wires and a state road goes out of sight in one direction and a new railroad track in another. There is not a tree, nothing but sage. As moonlight unto sunlight is that desert sage to other greens. The wind has magic in it, and the air is full of birds and birdsong” (417).

“Grandmother grew up on a farm and lived much of her life on crude frontiers. She knew the animal facts of life as few of us are likely to again. Without embarrassment she accepted the animal functions of, say, buggy horses that would bring giggles and hooraws from emancipated moderns. Until she and Grandfather built Zodiac Cottage in 1906, she habitually used a privy, and no gussied-up WPA privy either. She could kill a chicken, and dress it, and eat it afterward, with as little repugnance as her neighbor Mrs. Olpen, and that is something most of us couldn’t. we have been conditioned to think of chickens as neatly sorted cellophane packages of breasts, wings, legs, thighs, and necks, without guts or mess, without death. Death and life were everyday matters to Grandmother. The breeding of horses, mules, cattle, the parturition of dogs, the smug and polygamous fornications of chickens, raised no eyebrows. When animals died, the family had to deal with their bodies; when people died, the family’s women laid them out. In the 1880s you suffered animal pain to a degree no modern would submit to. You bore your children, more likely than not, without anesthetic” (497).

While gathering his biography, Lyman is eager to portray the study of history as something of value, especially for modern readers like his son Rodman. In order to accomplish this, Lyman uses what he calls the “Doppler Effect,” in which he brings the reader extraordinary close to his subject, so close in fact, that we can hear inner thoughts. It is a brand of imaginative or speculative history which is helped along by the aid of her letters and other personal reflections. For example, Susan used to receive letters from isolated miners and geologists and surveyors who had once come across copies of her work in Century or Atlantic magazines asking how a lady of refinement had come to learn so much about engineering practices like drifts, stopes, tipples, pumps, ores assays, mining law, claim jumpers, underground surveying, and one in particular wanted know where she learned to handle so casually a term like “angle of repose.” It is this question of the “angle of repose” which I found so perplexing and which becomes the subject of Lyman’s investigation into his troubled past and present:

“It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don’t mean the rigid angle at which I rest in this chair. I wonder if you ever reached it. There was a time up there in Idaho when everything was wrong; your husband’s career, your marriage, your sense of yourself, your confidence, all came unglued together. Did you come down out of that into some restful 30° angle and live happily ever after? When you died at ninety-one, The New York Times obituary spoke of you as a Western woman, a Western writer and artist. Would you have accepted the label? Or did you cling forever to the sentiment you wrote to Augusta Hudson from the bottom of failure in Boise, Canyon –that not even Henry James’s expatriates were so exiled as you? We shared this house all the years of my childhood, and a good many summers afterward. Was the quiet I always felt in you really repose? I wish I thought so. It is one of the questions I want the papers to answer” (13-14).

The central tension in Angle of Repose comes when, back in the 19th century, we learn that Susan has engaged in an ambiguous romantic dalliance with Oliver’s assistant, Frank Sargent (she begins addressing him with the word “thee” which she previously reserved for her relationships with Augusta and Oliver). At first, Susan and Frank are sneakily flirtatious in private little moments, however, Frank soon grows bold enough to kiss Susan. And when tragedy strikes, Susan’s youngest daughter Agnes drowns in an irrigation ditch under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Frank then commits suicide in his bed which leads Oliver and his son Ollie to piece together what might have happened. But as readers, we ask are forced to ourselves what actually did happen? Like Lyman’s typist, Shelly, we demand to know if Susan had actually slept with Frank, but Lyman brushes aside this modern demand for perfect clarity, and decides to leave his grandmother’s private life inside a murky, opaque dream. Lyman prefers to keep us in the dark (earlier in the book, he hid some of Susan’s letters from Shelly). But what we can deduce is that Susan was unfaithful to her husband either in thought or in action, and it affected their marriage. Here, the parallels with Lyman’s own marriage are unavoidable (not to mention the echoes of Shelly’s personal mess of a marriage in which her husband apparently stole her credit card to buy cigarettes and as mea culpa he sent a gift of 24 canaries to her from the Emporium in San Francisco). At any rate, in response to Susan’s unfaithfulness and the loss of a daughter, Oliver decides to uproot and destroy his special rose garden –a troubling, deeply disconcerting moment which serves as the destruction of any possibility of new life in their marriage. The rose garden comes to symbolize something that is lost that can never be reborn. However, in consideration of his wife Ellen’s infidelity, Lyman has had neither a mea culpa moment from her nor a prized possession like his grandfather’s rose garden which he can destroy. Instead, he must simply sit and wait with his lingering fixation on what has happened, while the terminus of his marriage remains seemingly unresolved. The biography of his grandmother is a distraction, but also a melancholic inquiry into the sacred past as he watches his grandfather embrace the hope of an uncertain future in the 19th century West while his grandmother steadily grows despondent over being denied the cultured life she had envisioned for herself.

Susan Burling Ward, was an old lady by the time she reached her “angle of repose” –she had already reached the zenith of her life. So, how are we to understand her angle of repose? Lyman considers the angle of repose as a potential title for his book even though it really “doesn’t matter. The title’s the least of it… It isn’t a book anyway, it’s just a kind of investigation into a life” and a way to be “living a day in his grandparents’ life to avoid paying too much attention to his own.” Towards the end of the novel, Lyman admits: “… I lie awake, I lose confidence in what I myself am doing, I even find myself bending toward the notion of an inane tranquilized existence in Rodman’s Menlo Park pasture” (476) –the latter “Menlo Park pasture” is a reference to a senior care facility his son Rodman is keen on for his father. In engineering terms, the angle of repose refers to the steepest angle of a descending plane whereupon various forms of material can be piled upon it without slumping or spilling downward. In other words, the angle of repose is the highest point of stability before certain material, like dirt, will begin to tumble downward via a hill or cliffside. And it is precisely this concept of stability which Lyman appears to be metaphorically lacking –his health has deteriorated and his marriage has fallen apart. Additionally, he feels civilization in the 1960s is no longer tenable so he retreats into the past as a refuge, in search of an angle of repose between past and present. In the same way that Lyman has been quite literally cut off from the use of his legs, he has also been cut off the from the past and the present, along with his marital union. In looking backward, he hopes to find the place of balance in his grandmother’s marriage, where it all went wrong, and he wonders how she and Oliver ever found their own stability again after the “slow corrosion of the affection and loyalty” that held them together for so long. Were there stronger bonds in the past that kept them together? Were people like Susan and Oliver ever truly happy back then? Did they have greater respect for traditions? What secrets did they keep about life and love? Why does the modern world feel so uprooted and disconnected from these shadowy, venerated figures of the past? Lyman struggles to find answers to these questions. Angle of Repose is a fictional biography that examines and questions the very idea of biography as a form of historical inquiry –how can a historian accurately or succinctly present a person’s life? Are there too many subtleties and nuances to accurately paint a picture? What does it even mean to convey an accurate biography? Can we ever truly know a person simply by what is found in the historical record?

With respect to his grandmother, Lyman speculates that she was likely never really happy after her thirty-seventh year, the last year she lived her idyll in Boise Canyon. It was essentially all over in 1890, and the permanently horizontal “angle of repose” for Susan and Oliver lasted another fifty more years, but Lyman does not concern himself with those later events in this novel. He is mainly concerned with the crux of their angle of repose. As he concludes the book, Lyman notes that “wisdom is knowing what you have to accept” and he wonders if he will be man enough to be a bigger man than his grandfather –presumably, despite his physically weak body, Lyman hopes to remain strong in never forgiving his wife for her past transgressions, and perhaps discover a new path toward a happier life.

“So they lived unhappily ever after… Year after irrelevant year, half a century almost, through one world war and through the Jazz Age and through the Depression and the New Deal and all that; through Prohibition and Women’s Rights, through the automobile and radio and television and into the second world war. Through all those changes, and not a change in them” (623).

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Upon initial publication in 1971, Angle of Repose was reviewed favorably by Thomas Lask in an article in The New York Times entitled “El Dorado on the Horizon” in which he wrote that Angle of Repose “is a disquisition on the high price paid by men of ability and women of taste for the opening and developing of the West. The financial rewards could be great, but the waste in spiritual resources, cultural disappointment and blasted hopes could be equally great.” However, this review was quickly followed by more critical reviews in the Sunday Book Review –William Dubois accused it being “too well made” and stated that after he reached page 569, he was “convinced that an essential element was missing … the addict [of the well‐made novel] can be forgiven for wanting something even better.” And once Angle of Repose was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972, John Leonard also wrote in The New York Times a less-than-flattering commentary: “This year the jurors danced themselves dizzy around the Maypole and bumped into Wallace Stegner, an estimable man. His “Angle of Repose” won out over Updike and Oates (again), Walker Percy, Hortense Calisher, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Stanley Elkin, Frederick Buechner and E. L. Doctorow.”

Throughout his career Wallace Stegner had a fairly testy relationship with the “East Coast Media Conspiracy” over the years, especially with The New York Times when the paper failed to review his National Book Award-winning book The Spectator Bird and even misspelled his name as “William” Stegner. Even with flashes of Willa Cather, Norman Maclean, Wendell Berry (who was one of his students), and Larry McMurtry (who was also one of his students), Wallace Stegner often found himself frustrated and reportedly “heartbroken” at the fact that he was never seemingly fully embraced by the East Coast literary elite. However, in 2009, on the centenary of the late Stegner’s birth, Timothy Egan published a remembrance in The New York Times appropriately titled “Stegner’s Complaint.” In it many commenters offered their memories of Stegner, including fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Jane Smiley. And in 2020, A.O. Scott also published a literary biography of Wallace Stegner in The New York Times entitled “Wallace Stegner and the Conflicted Soul of the West.” It seems that in more recent years The Times has been keen to redeem itself of past missteps against the late Wallace Stegner who passed away in 1993.  

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On The Mary Hallock Foote Controversy

No review of Angle of Repose would be complete without addressing its chief controversy. In 1946, when researching various historical literary papers for a chapter entitled “Western Record and Romance” which was to be included in the Literary History of the United States, Wallace Stegner (then a professor at Stanford) came across Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) –a “genteel, nineteenth century local-color writer and illustrator.” When he devoured her many papers, they lay in his brain like an “unfertilized egg… What hatched, after three years, was a novel about time, about cultural transplantation and change, about the relations of a man with his ancestors and descendants.” Of his epic novel, Stegner said, “It’s perfectly clear that if every writer is born to write one story, this is my story.” And linking the past and the present, he believed “we live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings” (6).

Thus, Angle of Repose is directly based on the life and writings of Mary Hallock Foote, an educated gentlewoman of the East who moved West with her engineer-husband as they migrated between various mining communities in the Old West. While her personal letters have never been published as of 2024, in 1972, about thirty-four years after her death, historian Rodman Paul released her unpublished memoir entitled A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far East. In it, the life of a rare educated frontier woman treats readers to a unique first-hand picture of the American West from one of the more popular writers and illustrators of the 19^th century (much like Susan Burling Ward in Angle of Repose, the real Mary Hallock Foote was a celebrated literary figure who welcomed many dignitaries and cultural luminaries to her home in Grass Valley while she illustrated stories for great American writers like Hawthorne, Longfellow, Alcott, Harte, and others).

Before publishing Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner communicated extensively and received permission from the surviving ancestors of Mary Hallock Foote to use her story as inspiration for his book. However, after it was released, some family members were angered by the book. Evelyn Foote Gardiner hoped it would be a work of pure historical fiction a la Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy, while other family members were angry that Stegner decided to quote extensive passages directly from Foote’s letters. Foote’s granddaughter, Janet Micoleau (whose name appears as “J.M.” in the book’s dedication) appears to have been the primary family member with whom Stegner was in correspondence. Initially, Larry McMurtry was set to write a biography of Foote’s life, but when he aged out, Stegner took up the challenge with his own idea for a fictional biography. And he promised Janet Micoleau that he would disguise any true names in the novel in order to prevent the scrutiny of direct connection to Foote.

But once the book was published, outrage and accusations started to fly –Stegner was accused of being a plagiarist, a thief, a revisionist historian, a disrespectful false biographer and so on. He also faced charges of racism and sexism. He was accused of being a privileged white male who infantilized the life of an impressive historical woman, and a false-historian who portrayed the West as a place devoid of indigenous/native groups. Sadly, Janet Micoleau was also confronted with the ire of her family for agreeing to lend Foote’s documents to Stegner, and she soon suffered a nervous breakdown. Even today, years after Stegner’s death, articles still continue to be published lambasting Stegner for this book.

Personally, I can offer no strong opinion on the controversy. Did Wallace Stegner steal too much historical information from the Foote archive? Did he fly a little too close to the sun and step over the line of verisimilitude in this respect? Or was his book enough to qualify as “fair use” under U.S. copyright law? Admittedly, answers elude me. However, I will conclude this section by quoting Stegner’s dedication comment at the beginning of Angle of Repose:   

“My thanks to J.M. and her sister for the loan of their ancestors. Though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.”

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Notable Quotations:

“Now I believe they will leave me alone” (opening line).

“Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especiall my grandparents were –inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial” (3-4).

“I think her love for my grandfather, however real, was always somewhat unwilling. She must unconsciously have agreed with his judgment that she was higher and finer than he. I wonder if there was some moment when she fully comprehended and appreciated him? I wonder if there was a time when the East and all that Edith Wharton gentility had been lived out of her as surely as the cells of her girlhood had been replaced in her body?” (15).

“The West began for Susan Burling on the last day of 1868, more than a century ago” (23).

“She was looking back more than sixty years, I am looking back more than a century, but I think I hear the same tone, or tones, the she did: of the sound of the future coming on for the girl of twenty-one, the darker sound of the past receding for the woman of eighty-four” 33).

“Contrary to popular myth, the West was not made entirely pioneers who had thrown everything away but an ax and a gun” (33).

“What did a girl of 1873 feel, waiting for the stranger whom she had never taken quite seriously but whom she had now, in her mind, half resolved to marry?” (53).

“Susan Burling I historically admire, and when she was an old lady I loved her very much. But I wish I could take her by the ear and lead her aside and ell her a few thigs. Nemesis in a wheelchair, knowing the future, I could tell her that it is dangerous for a bride to be apologetic about her husband” (62). 

“How she managed to part from Augusta, God knows. I imagine them coming apart like two of the great sheets of flypaper, stuck glue to glue, that I used to separate and set out for summer flies. I know it is not reverent way to speak of the parting of true minds, but I can’t help it. Obviously I think Susan was better off in the care of Oliver Ward, train fare, than under the influence of that glamorous and arty socialite” (67).

“Susan Ward came West not to join a new society but to endure it, not to build anything but to enjoy a temporary experience and make it yield whatever instruction it contained” (77).

“Poor Grandmother. She might have lived an idyll in her honeymoon cottage in the picnic West if her heart had not bled eastward” (101).

“How living the faces were, and how eloquent the postures, of the miners who stood or sat waiting for the bosses to get through. What things the vagrant inadequate light did to a brown cheek, a mustache, the whiteness of teeth, the shine of eyes looking out their corners at her. It was like nothing she had ever drawn, a world away from the cider presses and sheepfolds and quiet lanes and farmyard scenes and pensive maidens of her published drawings, yet this scene, lurid and dimly fearful, spoke to her” (147).

“…Because now there’s a future. We can look out into fog as thick as cream and be certain it will burn away. We can hear all those lost squawks and know that as soon as Creation says the right word they’ll be birds” (196).

“I find it hard to make anything of Grandmother’s parents. They take me too far back, I have no landmarks in their world. They were Quaker, kind, loving, getting old, simple people but by no means simple minded. They probably thought their daughter more talented and adventurous than anyone could be. I can’t see them as individuals, I can only type-cast them, a pair of character actors with white hair and Granny glasses. Leave them as a sort of standardized family welcome –tight clutch of hugs, tearful kisses, exclamations, smell of orris root from Great-grandmother’s hair, scamper of Bessie’s feet in from the kitchen –she is here too!—calls to the barn for Father to come, Susan’s home” (211).

“…she felt the mountains breathe in her face their ancient, frightening cold” (243).

“She must have known that a Thomas Hudson, despite his urbanity, uprightness, and delicacy of feeling, would not have got that dying horse in motion fast enough to save them, or got it on over the summit to the place of help. Almost before she had stopped screaming and pulling at his hard whip arm, she felt shame. It was his physical readiness, his unflusterable way of doing what was needed in a crisis, that she most respected in him: it made him different from the men she had known… That day in June 1879, they came down off Mosquito Pass silent and constrained, she scared and sulky, he worried and somewhat bruised in spirit at being thought a brute. Or I suppose that is what he felt. The fact is, I don’t know. He is the silent character in this cast, he did not defend himself when he thought he was wronged, and he left no novels, stories, drawings, or reminisces to speak for him. I only assume what he felt, from knowing him as an old man. He never did less than the best he knew how. If that was not enough, if he felt criticism in the air, he put on his hat and walked out” (254, Susan contrasting her husband Oliver Ward with Thomas Hudson).

“I wonder if ever again Americans can have that experience of returning to a home place so intimately known, profoundly felt, deeply loved, and absolutely submitted to? It is not quite true that you can’t go home again. I have done it, coming back here. But it gets less likely. We have had too many divorces, we have consumed too much transportation, we have lived too shallowly in too many places” (303).

“Gentility is inherited through the female line like hemophilia, and is all but incurable” (346).

“A historian scans a thousand documents to find one fact that he can use. If he is working with correspondence, as I am, and with the correspondence of a woman to boot, he will wade toward his little islands of information through a dismal swamp of recipes, housekeeping details, children’s diseases, insignificant visitors, inconclusive conversations with people unknown to the historian, and recitations of what the writer did yesterday” (420).

“No life goes past so swiftly as an eventless one, no clock spins like a clock whose days are all alike. It is a law I take advantage of, and bless, but then I am not young, ambitious, and balked” (438).

“1970 knows nothing about isolation and nothing about silence” (465).

“Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they’d spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don’t think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don’t like crowds, I don’t like noise, I don’t like anarchy, I don’t even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation –not better, different. I don’t like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it” (575).  

“There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone” (631).

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On the 1972 Pulitzer Prize Decision

In 1972, the jury report read: “It may have been a bad year for the economy, but writers continued to write and publishers to publish, and on the whole it was a good if not great year for books… Fiction, however, fared indifferently, and your jury was disappointed that the overall level of the entries submitted was no higher than it was. The omens had been for an exceptional year with new novels by major writers like John Updike, Mary McCarthy, Benard Malamud, Robert Penn Warren, Joyce Carol Oates, Wallace Stegner, and Walker Percy –an impressive constellation of luminaries. But the result was a Barmecide feast. In the words of one juror, Maurice Dolbier, ‘A lot of the big ambitious ones fell on their big ambitious faces.’”

The report further stated: “Gentility and frontier exigence inform, and grate on, each other in the saga of the pioneer West, whose real setting is the human soul. A novel is the true American grain built around a memorable woman character, Angle of Repose impressed the jury as a solidly conceived, handsomely crafted work of fiction which fulfilled in manner and matter the requirements for a Pulitzer Prize.”

In summary, the jury considered Rabbit Redux by John Updike, The Tenants by Bernard Malamud, and Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates. And they also praised The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest Gaines, and Love in the Ruins by Walker Percy –but Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner was the unanimous choice. When the Board agreed, 63-year-old Wallace Stegner became the next Pulitzer Prize winner. However, this was the second year in a row that The New York Times Book Review blasted the decision, with John Leonard accusing the decision of being “middlebrow” and “safe.” Rabbit Redux was likely the preferred selection since it was featured in The Times’ Christmas summary.

The three-person fiction jury in 1972 included:

• John Barkham (1908-1998) was originally born in South Africa on an ostrich farm, before later migrating to the United States where he became a historical book reviewer, focusing primarily on books about Africa. According to his obituary in The New York Times, in his heyday, Mr. Barkham could deliver a stream of 4-6 book reviews per week. He would typically sit back in his Eames leather reading chair at 3pm, and once finished reading, he would handwrite his review of the book before typing it up again on his typewriter. His writing appeared in numerous publications including TIME, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Post and others. Mr. Barkham served on many Pulitzer juries in the categories of Fiction, Nonfiction, and Biography over a period of approximately 20 years.
• Maurice Dolbier (1912-1993) was a former book editor of The New York Herald Tribune and The Providence Journal-Bulletin. He became literary editor of The Journal in 1951 and a book reviewer at The Tribune in 1956, but returned to The Journal in 1967 after The Tribune and its successor, The World Journal Tribune, closed. He was fondly remembered as an “intellectual with a dashing mustache” by one of his successors Alan Rosenberg at The Journal. He retired in 1985. Dolbier was also an actor and the author of children’s books. He wrote two novels, six children’s books (including The Magic Bus), and several plays. For many years, Dolbier co-hosted a “Book and Author” Luncheon with Irita Van Doren (who also previously served on several Pulitzer Fiction juries from 1961-1963). The luncheon was sponsored by The New York Herald Tribune and then the American Booksellers Association. Dolbier died in 1993 and was survived by two daughters.
• Jean Stafford (1915-1979) was a celebrated American writer. She wrote several novels but it was her short stories that earned widespread critical acclaim. In 1955, she on an O. Henry Award for her short story “In the Zoo” and she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her collected short stories in 1970. As far as I can tell, Stafford’s presence on the 1972 Fiction jury serves as one of the first instances in which the Pulitzer Prize invited a former Fiction winner to join a latter-day Fiction jury. Click here for my full review of her Pulitzer Prize victory in 1970.

After winning the Pulitzer Prize, Stegner later expressed mixed feelings: “Living the width of a continent away from what calls itself headquarters, I don’t suppose the Pulitzer Prize is going to change my reputation substantially. After all, there have been some fairly odd choices over the last forty or fifty years. Maybe I’m one of them. If I am, I guess I’m not going to fret too much, or spend a lot of time trying to persuade unconvinced critics that the judges were right and they wrong. Je m’en fiche. But I can tell you that the prize gave this provincial novelist a great thrill. I value the prize, deserved or otherwise.”   

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Who is Wallace Stegner?

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was dubbed the “Dean of Western Writers.” He was born in Lake Mills, Iowa, the younger of two sons of Scandinavian immigrants and in his autobiographical history of Saskatchewan entitled Wolf Willow he describes living in “twenty places in eight states” –in places like Great Falls, MT; Salt Lake City, UT among the Mormons; Greensboro, VT; and a rural wheat-farming homestead in Eastend, Saskatchewan near the Montana border. his father George Stegner was what he described as a rugged, intolerant “boomer,” a man looking to make a fortune in the West in wheat-farming during World War I before turning to bootlegging and running an illegal saloon while evading the police. In contrast, his mother was a “nester,” a woman wanting to maintain a stable home of her own.

Stegner’s life spanned from the last homestead frontier in Sasketchewan to the information age in Silicon Valley. He had a literary career that covered more than 50 years and produced more than two dozen novels, including both historical works and collections of stories and essays. Stegner expressed “a respect for the heroic virtues: fortitude, resolution, magnanimity.” Per his obituary in The New York Times, his characters seem to be propelled by the author’s conviction “that man, even Modern Man, has some dignity if he will assume it, and that most lives are worth living even when they are lives of quiet desperation.” He also challenged stereotypes of the West – turning the John Wayne archetype on its head. He once told a reporter in 1981: “The West does not need to explore its myths much further; it has already relied on them too long… The West is politically reactionary and exploitative: admit it. The West as a whole is guilty of inexplicable crimes against the land: admit that, too. The West is rootless, culturally half-baked. So be it.” He felt the American West represented “the New World’s last chance to be something better, the only American society still malleable enough to be formed.”

Stegner earned his BA from the University of Utah in 1930 where was initiated into the Sigma Nu fraternity. He then received a master’s degree in 1932 and a doctorate in 1935, both from the University of Iowa. Shortly before receiving his PhD, he married Mary Stuart Page in 1934. They were married for 59 years and, according to famed public intellectual Arthur Schlesinger Jr., they shared a “personal literary partnership of singular facility.”

Stegner then taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University before eventually settling at Stanford University where he founded a celebrated creative writing program. His students included Wendell Berry, Sandra Day O’Connor, Edward Abbey, Simin Daneshvar, Andrew Glaze, George V. Higgins, Thomas McGuane, Robert Stone, Ken Kesey, Gordon Lish, Ernest Gaines, and Larry McMurtry.

Like Lyman Ward, Wallace Stegner rejected the “antihistorical pose of the young” during the 1960s. Early on, he marched in student protests against the Vietnam War but when protests turned violent he refused to support the destruction of property on the Stanford campus –what would that do to end the war? “By nature Stegner was the antithesis of the in-your-face hatred and anarchy that surrounded him. He was liberal politically, but a man of old-fashioned virtues –polite, courteous, kind—who applied a great deal of self-discipline to his life and who usually repressed the kind of witty sarcasm or outspoken opinionatedness that his first-person narrators are likely to voice” (per the introduction to Angle of Repose by Jackson J. Benson, 2000).

He also served in a variety of voluntary leadership positions throughout his career –as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall; on the Sierra Club’s board of directors; he co-founded the Committee for Green Foothills, an environmental organization dedicated to preserving and protecting the hills, forests, creeks, wetlands and coastal lands of the San Francisco Peninsula; and as a leading member of the Peninsula Housing Association, a group of locals in Palo Alto aiming to build a large co-operative housing complex for Stanford University faculty and staff on a 260-acre ranch the group had purchased near campus. He lived in a house near Matadero Creek on Three Forks Road in Los Altos Hills and became one of the town’s most prominent residents.

Throughout his extensive career, Stegner won numerous accolades include the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angle of Repose in 1972; the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird in 1977; the National Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992 (which he declined because he believed the NEA had become too politicized). Earlier in his career, he won the Little Brown Prize for Remembering Laughter in 1937 which effectively jumpstarted his literary career. He was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Los Angeles Times.

Several prizes and fellowships have been founded in his name: The Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental or American Western History was established in 2010 at the University of Utah; an annual history lecture at Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho; and of course The Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University –a two-year creative writing fellowship which has boasted such fellows as Wendell Berry, Larry McMurtry, Tobias Wolff and many others.   

Stegner died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on April 13, 1993, not long after a car accident on March 28, 1993 in Santa Fe where he was giving a lecture. The cause of death was respiratory failure according to Lynn Stegner, his daughter-in-law. In addition to his daughter-in-law, he was survived by his wife, Mary; and his son, Page Stegner (to whom he had dedicated Angle of Repose), a novelist and professor emeritus of American literature and creative writing at UC Santa Cruz. Wallace Stegner’s papers are housed at the University of Utah and Montana State University.

Film Adaptations:

• None, though there was an opera that premiered at San Francisco Opera in 1976.

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Literary Context in 1971-1972:

• Nobel Prize for Literature (1972): German author Heinrich Böll “for his writing which through its combination of a broad perspective on his time and a sensitive skill in characterization has contributed to a renewal of German literature.”
• National Book Award Winner (1972): The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor
• Booker Prize Winner (1970): G. by John Berger
• Per Publisher’s Weekly, the #1 bestseller in 1971 was Wheels by Arthur Hailey. Other books on the list included The Exorcist by William P. Blatty, The Passions of the Mind by Irving Stone, The Winds of War by Herman Wouk (who previously won the Pulitzer for The Caine Mutiny), The Drifters by James Michener (who previously won the Pulitzer for Tales of the South Pacific), and Rabbit Redux by John Updike.
• In 1971, the first e-book was posted on Project Gutenberg –a copy of the U.S. Constitution.
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson was published in Rolling Stone.
• Powell’s Books first opened in Portland, Oregon.
• The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty was published.
• The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin was published.
• Rabbit Redux by John Updike was published.
• August 1914 by Alexander Solzhenitsyn was published.
• In a Free State by V.S. Naipaul was published. 
• The Lorax by Dr. Seuss was published.  

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Did The Right Book Win?

In my opinion, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose stands out as one of the better decisions made by the Pulitzer Prize –in this case, they selected a truly great American novel. I spent a considerable amount of time –nearly a month—reading this novel, and I offer my sincere apologies for this lengthy review (if brevity is the soul of wit, then my excesses of the former only further confirm my dearth of the latter). At any rate, my one ironic qualm with Angle of Repose is that it is far too long of a book which utterly drones on at points in the mid-section –I struggled mightily with how to go about examining its many intricacies– but, all things considered, Angle of Repose is a brilliant novel, well-deserving of its Pulitzer laurels. I suspect I will be contemplating its true meaning for quite some time to come.  

Click here to return to my survey of the Pulitzer Prize Winners.