Classics, Family Saga, Literary, California, Grandparents, Older people, People with Disabilities, Historians, Married people, Adultery, Domestic fiction 

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. 

Publisher Comments
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize when it was first published in 1971, Angle of Repose has also been selected by the editorial board of the Modern Library as one of the hundred best novels of the twentieth century.
Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Set in many parts of the West, Angle of Repose is a story of discovery--personal, historical, and geographical--that endures as Wallace Stegner's masterwork: an illumination of yesterday's reality that speaks to today's.

Angle of Repose is a long, intricate, deeply rewarding novel, wrote William Abrahams in the Atlantic Monthly. It is neither the predictable historical-regional Western epic, nor the equally predictable four-decker family saga, the Forsytes in California, so to speak. . . . For all its breadth and sweep, Angle of Repose achieves an effect of intimacy, hence of immediacy, and, though much of the material is 'historical, ' an effect of discovery also, of experience newly minted rather than a pageantlike re-creation. . . . Wallace Stegner has written a superb novel, with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction.

Angle of Repose is a novel about Time, as much as anything--about people who live through time, who believe in both a past and a future. . . . It reveals how even the most rebelliouscrusades of our time follow paths that our great-grandfathers' feet beat dusty.

--Wallace Stegner

Review
"Cause for celebration....A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richenss of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction." The Atlantic Monthly
Review
"A fine novel, engrossing and mature...for when all is said individual lives are very much like bits of detritus, rolling down from the high places of stress and emotion until they reach that place where the tumpling and falling stops and they find their angle of repose. To chronicle this movement as well as this novel does is high art — and first-rate writing." San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
Synopsis
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.

About the Author
Among the other novels of Wallace Stegner (1909--1993) are The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), Joe Hill (1950), All the Little Live Things (1967), The Spectator Bird (1976); Recapitulation (1979), and Crossing to Safety (1987). From 1945 to 1971 Stegner taught at Stanford University, where the writing program is named after him. 

Genre/Form: Domestic fiction
Fiction
Material Type: Fiction, Internet resource
Document Type: Book, Internet Resource
All Authors / Contributors: Wallace Stegner

ISBN: 0679603387 9780679603382
OCLC Number: 42072221
Awards: Pulitzer Prize, 1972, Fiction
Description: ix, 632 pages ; 21 cm
Responsibility: Wallace Stegner.