Angle of Repose By: Wallace Stegner Category: Novel Guide Created By: Traude Discussion Leader(s): Traude Click here to visit the discussion Guide Description In this brilliant 1972 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the fictional narrator recounts the lives of his grandparents in the developing American West, their hardships and sacrifices. The book explores the weight of history and the burden of the past. Background Information "Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery - personal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he is willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family." (Book Jacket) After retirement from academic life, Lyman Ward returns to his grandparents' home at the Zodiac Cottage, Grass Valley, California, over the strenuous objections of his son, Rodman. Irascible, uncertain, feeling obsolete, abandoned by his wife, Lyman is convinced that life was purer and simpler in the olden days and sets out to prove it. He begins by meticulously sorting the letters and papers left by his grandmother, Susan Ward. A writer and artist, Susan Ward had made her journey west (somewhat reluctantly) as a bride in 1876. The characters of Susan and Oliver Ward are based on the turn-of-the- century writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) and her husband, Arthur De Wint Foote, an idealistic scientist and pioneer. Wallace Stegner, born in 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa, had what he called a "migrant childhood" as his parents moved all over the West. Educated in Utah and Iowa, he embarked on a teaching career which led him to the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and eventually Stanford U., where he founded the Creative Writers Program. Several of his students have become respected writers themselves, including Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, Raymond Carver, and Larry McMurtry. Stegner was a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction. His essays are full of pleasure, wisdom and love of the land. He has been called "Explainer of the West" and "Dean and Mentor of Western Writers". He was awarded several literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for ANGLE OF REPOSE, his tenth novel. He died in 1993 from complications following an automobile accident.

Questions

• Lyman Ward has retreated to his grandparents' refuge at Grass Valley. His circumstances are graphically described in Part I. Saddled with constant pain, living in the solitude he chose over his practical son's objections, he begins to go through the stacks of papers the grandparents, especially grandmother Susan, left.
  
  On page 17 he says, "I get glimpses of lives close to mine, related to mine in ways I recognize but don't completely comprehend. I'd like to live in their clothes a while, if only so I didn't have to live in my own."
  
  This is the premise.
  
  
• In Chapter 4 of Part I we meet the grandparents. We see their disparate backgrounds and witness a strange sort of courtship that spans 5 years.
  
  One question only at this time : Does this couple have a chance ?
  
  
• What drew a sophisticated woman like Susan Ward to a relatively uncultivated man like Oliver?
  
  
• Given the limitations placed on women in her era, was Susan ahead of her time?
  
  
• Is there a parallel between Susan Ward and Shelly Rasmussen?
  
  
• What did you think about the "social order" at New Almaden, the Hacienda and the ethnically segregated mining camps?
  
  
• How do Susan and Oliver's experiences compare with the myths of the American West ? Are they different from the stereotypical western hero?
  
  
• Do you think Susan's life would have been different if she had stayed in the East ?
  
  
• Was the tragedy predictable ? Preventable ?
  
  
• Why did Stegner end the book with a(n all too vividly described) dream?
  
  
• What lesson, if any, is in the MANIFESTO (pg. 513 ff.) ?
  
  
• What do you make of the reference to Thoreau and his contempt for the civilization of men who lived lives of quiet desperation ?
  
  
• I am inclined to see the last two paragraphs as hopeful. Do you agree ?