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Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner
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Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

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3,252891,550 (4.29)232
20th century (37) adultery (15) American (44) American fiction (30) American literature (58) American West (95) book club (24) California (63) classic (27) classics (17) family (33) fiction (565) historical (14) historical fiction (72) history (14) Idaho (15) literary fiction (16) literature (57) marriage (40) mining (35) novel (90) own (19) Pulitzer (63) Pulitzer Prize (98) read (34) to-read (61) unread (21) USA (17) West (30) western (19)
  1. 00
    A Sudden Country: A Novel by Karen Fisher (amelielyle)
    amelielyle: Both are novels of the American West. Both are the story of intelligent women constrained by the role of 19th century wife and mother. Part of the pathos of each story is the dissolution of those marriages. Lyrical and image-provoking writing style.
  2. 00
    Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker (fountainoverflows)
  3. 00
    PENGUIN BOOK OF THE AMERICAN WEST by David Lavender (Polaris-)
  4. 01
    My Ántonia by Willa Cather (StevenTX)
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"Tantrums and passions I don’t need, endurance is what I need. I have found that it is even possible to take a certain pleasure out of submission to necessity."


This novel won the author a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. It is about a wheel chaired historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. It is directly based on the letters of Colorado author, Mary Hallock Foote.
  AmronGravett | Apr 11, 2013 |
i don't normally have high expectations of pulitzer winners, but this. is. beautiful. i don't even know what else to say. beautiful. ( )
  elisa.saphier | Apr 2, 2013 |
Beautiful. ( )
  gwak | Mar 30, 2013 |
This put me in mind of East of Eden, but with a much more personal edge to it. I guess it would be like East of Eden written from Cal's son's point of view. And there was less unambiguous "good" and "evil" in Angle of Repose than in East of Eden; it was just people acting the way people do, which is most often neither good nor evil. At any rate, I really enjoyed it. It seemed true to me (not in a "true or false" sense, but in a "true to human emotions" sense). I've been on a kick to discover more about the American West, and I like the clearer picture Angle of Repose has given me. ( )
  ImperfectCJ | Dec 31, 2012 |
[Angle of Repose] is an interesting book both for the way it's written as well as for the story it tells. It's a book within a book. Lyman Ward is a 57 year old historian who has lost half of one leg and has a completely stiffened spine. He moves into his ancestral home in Grass Valley, CA (that's in the Sierra Nevada foothills in northern CA) to research his grandparent's lives, largely by reviewing a large collection of letters his grandmother wrote to a childhood friend. Part of the story deals with his physical struggles and his relationship with his son, ex-wife, and his current care-givers. The bulk of the book, however, is the story of his grandparents.

Grandmother was born int he mid-19th century to a proper middle-class quaker family in Connecticut. She is well-educated artistic, loves literature and good conversation. She marries grandfather Oliver on the rebound after a man she is fond of and who she thinks is going to marry her instead marries her best friend (with whom she may have had more than a platonic friendship). Oliver is a mining engineer in love with the west and with an outdoor life. He's the strong silent type, and rather uncomfortable in "polite society". He's a dreamer of big dreams; she's a practical person concerned with the day-to-day

These two start life together in California. Grandmother thinks it is a temporary adventure; grandfather knows it is his life. The story follows them through ups and downs as mines close, opportunities turn out to be not what they seem, comfort and friends are found in remote places, and dreams are followed.

The grandparents' story is a wonderful look at life in the American west at the end of the 19th century but that is not what Lyman is really interested in. He says: "What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spend their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any."

The "angle of repose" is the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling.

This is a wonderful book, rich in many ways. ( )
3 vote Chautauquan | Nov 13, 2012 |
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For my son, Page
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Now I believe they will leave me alone.
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When frontier historians theorize about the uprooted, the lawless, the purseless, and the socially cut-off who settled the West, they are not talking about people like my grandmother. So much that was cherished and loved, women like her had to give up; and the more they gave it up, the more they carried it helplessly with them. It was a process like ionization: what was subtracted from one pole was added to the other. For that sort of pioneer, the West was not a new country being created, but an old one being reproduced...
...the “angle of repose,” which means the angle at which dirt and pebbles stop rolling.
What interests me in all these papers is not Susan Burling Ward the novelist and illustrator, and not Oliver Ward the engineer, and not the West they spent their lives in. What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That’s where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any.
Remember the one who wanted to know where you learned to handle so casually a technical term like “angle of repose”. I suppose you replied, “By living with an engineer,” but you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life. ... 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 degree angle and live happily ever after? … 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?
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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 014016930X, Paperback)

Wallace Stegner's Pultizer 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's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.

(retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 14:00:18 -0500)

(see all 5 descriptions)

Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is the story of four generations in the life of an American family. A wheelchair-bound retired historian embarks on a monumental quest: to come to know his grandparents, now long dead. The unfolding drama of the story of the American West sets the tone for Stegner's masterpiece. Four generations in the life of an American family are chronicled as retired historian Lyman Ward, confined to a wheelchair, decides to write his grandparent's history. The Pulitzer Prize-winning classic has been selected by the board of the Modern Library as one of the best hundred novels of the 20th century.… (more)

» see all 4 descriptions

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