Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [1]
Copyright @ Wallace Stegner, 1971
Introduction copyright © Jackson J. Benson, 2000
All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Stegner, Wallace Earle, 1909-
Angle of repose / Wallace Stegner ; with an introduction by Jackson J. Benson.
p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-101-07582-1
1. Historians—Fiction. 2. Physically handicapped—Fiction. 3. Married
people—Fiction. 4. Grandparents—Fiction. 5. Aged—Fiction. 6. California—
Fiction. I. Title. II. Series.
PS3537.T316A82000b
813’.52—dc21 00-062402
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For my son, Page.
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.
INTRODUCTION
Angle of Repose is Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece, the crown jewel in a multifaceted writing career. From the time he finished his Ph.D. in 1935 to his death in 1993, he published some fifty-eight short stories, a dozen novels, two histories, two biographies, a memoir-history, and five collections of essays. He was given numerous awards for his writings, including the Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose, the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird, and the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Los Angeles Times.
From the early 1950s, he became as well known for his environmental activities and writings as for his fiction. However, it was the writing of novels that was closest to his heart, and it was as a novelist that he wanted to be remembered. In a recent poll of readers of the San Francisco Chronicle voting on the best one hundred novels written about the West, Angle of Repose was listed number one. Often mentioned by critics as one of the most important American novels of the twentieth century, it alone should ensure Stegner’s reputation. (In a Chronicle poll of best nonfiction books, his John Wesley Powell biography, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, was listed number two.)
Wallace Stegner’s life almost spanned the twentieth century, from the last homestead frontier in Saskatchewan to the information age in Silicon Valley, from horse and plow to mouse and computer. The major strands of his career—his love of the land, his concern for history, his advocacy of cooperation and antagonism toward rugged individualism—and his dedication to writing can be clearly seen as products of his early life. He was born in Iowa in 1909, the younger of two sons, but the family soon moved to North Dakota, to Washington State, and then to Eastend, Saskatchewan. His father, George Stegner, was what his son later called a “boomer,” a man looking to find a fortune in the West and who, not finding it in one place, went to another. His mother was what Wallace called a “nester.” She wanted nothing more than a home of her own in which to raise a family.
Wallace’s accounts of his growing up make it clear that a dichotomy developed early in his consciousness between the proud, tough, intolerant rugged individualism represented by his father and the friendly, tolerant, neighborly tendencies toward caring and cooperation represented by his mother. And as we can see throughout his writing, Wallace’s sympathies