• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 11190 0

and Wallace was both. As a child, so often alone, Wallace became an omnivorous reader, reading whatever came his way, even devouring the Eaton Catalog. But neither his education in Canada, which tried to make a European of him, nor his own reading in geography or history had any relevance to the place where he lived: “Living in the Cypress Hills, I did not even know I lived there, and hadn’t the faintest notion of who had lived there before me.” The sense of his own lack of history grew in him as he matured, leading him to recognize the importance of knowing the history of one’s own family and region. Later, in addition to writing histories and the memoir-history Wolf Willow, which came out of an investigation of his own roots, he would do extensive historical research as a basis for several of his novels, including, of course, Angle of Repose.

The second important period in Wallace’s life would bring further support to his passion for history and to his interest in his roots. After leaving Saskatchewan, the family eventually ended up in Salt Lake City, where Wallace spent his teenage years. “The Mormons who built it and lived in it,” he has written, “had a strong sense of family and community, something the Stegners and the people they had lived among were notably short of.” Wallace never became a Mormon, but almost all of his friends were members of the church, and they brought him into its social activities. And despite the dislocations caused by his father and a dysfunctional family, he came to believe that he could belong, that he was not an outsider. In later years he considered Salt Lake his hometown, and he chronicled his returning home and rediscovering his youth in the novel Recapitulation. He was attracted not only by the Mormon emphasis on community and cooperation, but also by the Mormon devotion to the study of history and genealogy. He was so impressed by his experiences in Mormon culture that he later wrote his two histories, Mormon Country and The Gathering of Zion, about the development of that culture.

A sense of community and a sense of family unity were not, however, things that he had in his own immediate, personal life during those years. His father, giving up wheat farming (with which he had planned to make a fortune because of the demand during World War I), turned to bootlegging and running a “blind pig,” an illegal saloon, in their home. The family moved some twenty times during Wallace’s high school and college years in order to escape discovery by the police. This rootlessness, his mother’s isolation, and the fact that he could not bring friends to his own home further reinforced his sense of the importance of family and community We can see this background reflected in Angle of Repose’s concerns: for the effects of cultural transplantation, for the questions of what holds a family together and what drives it apart, and for having roots, in both family and place, and knowing about them.

Wallace worked his way not only through college but through graduate school as well. He had a fellowship at Iowa that kept him in school after graduating from the University of Utah. After he wrote three short stories for his M.A., his adviser, Norman Foerster, told him he should switch from creative writing and get his doctorate in an academic subject if he wanted to get a job teaching. Foerster further suggested that he investigate the writings of the western naturalist-geologist Clarence Dutton, a figure out of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth who had been largely overlooked.

By taking up this challenge, Stegner committed himself to what turned out to be a lifelong interest in nature writing. He would also develop a strong, continuing interest in that group of surveyors and geological explorers who, after the Civil War, mapped and described the West. (They included not only John Wesley Powell but Arthur De Wint Foote, the real-life counterpart of Oliver Ward in Angle of Repose.) And his dissertation topic led him to become an expert on the literature and history of the realistic-naturalistic