Angle of Repose in Never too Late to Read Classics

Dec 12, 2007 Chrissie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: usa, favorites, mexico, history, life-stages, audible-us, lgtb, classics, fiction, philo-psychol

First of all, I love Wallace Stegner’s prose.

Second of all, he knows what to tell, what to hold back and how to tie up a story. Even the title has meaning.

Stegner was given access to Mary Hallock Foote's letters and information about her life. It was first thought he would write a biography. He sought to get under her skin; he sought to understand who she really was and why she did what she did. What does one do when portions of what you are searching for are missing? You analyze and think deep ...more

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Feb 15, 2020 Kelly_Hunsaker_reads ... rated it it was amazing

Shelves: american-lit, pulitzer, read-in-2020, historical-fiction, frontier-western

Angle of Repose is a book that I went into completely blind. I knew nothing about it and had read nothing else by Stegner. The only thing I knew was that it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and I am working through that list of books. I am so glad that I went in blind because it surprised me in the best way. I love when a piece of historical fiction teaches me about a story I didn't previously know, and when a real person comes vividly to life on its pages. Stegner's book is based on the true stor Angle of Repose is a book that I went into completely blind. I knew nothing about it and had read nothing else by Stegner. The only thing I knew was that it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1972 and I am working through that list of books. I am so glad that I went in blind because it surprised me in the best way. I love when a piece of historical fiction teaches me about a story I didn't previously know, and when a real person comes vividly to life on its pages. Stegner's book is based on the true story of a woman pioneer in the west, and that makes the book both unique and powerful. So often when we tell the stories of history -- especially on the American frontier - they are the stories of men.

To tell his story, Stegner created a fictional character who is researching and writing the story of his grandparents. He is divorced, confined to a wheel chair after losing a leg. Angry. Depressed.
Isolated. But he discovers the story of his grandparents and it becomes his mission to write the tale. This man has two caretakers who help him to bathe and dress, and they become secretaries, taking dictation. His interactions with these two women provide both him and the reader some light-hearted relief in the story.

The grandmother in the story is based on the true story of Mary Hallock Foote, who was the child of a wealthy, New York, family of Quakers. She was born in 1847, and married a mining engineer who took her west to make his fortune. Many women from this era would have stayed east, waiting years for their husbands to return but Mary chose to go with him. She was often the only woman.

Mary wrote letters to her family and friends (and kept friendships alive) despite not seeing them for many years. She shared information about her life out west, her financial struggles, and some intimacies about her husband and family. She alsoTo keep her brain alive, she writes frequently to literary friends back east (often without seeing them for years) and we a learn a lot about her marriage, their family hardships and her financial struggles from these real letters. She’s an artist who sells her sketches drew pictures of western life which were sold to magazines back east, and this income was often the sole income for her family.

Mary was married for sixty years traveling the west, living in California, Colorado, South Dakota, Idaho and even Mexico. She had a tough life. Her husband never made that fortune and often lost money on his schemes.

I live in the mountains of Colorado. A few miles from me mining is still the biggest industry, and the old mines from Mary's time still dot the hillsides. Leadville is nearby. So the descriptions in this book were so real to me. I felt like I could walk down the streets nearby and see exactly what Mary saw and wrote about.

This was a wonderful read. ...more

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Jan 20, 2019 Laura rated it really liked it

Shelves: 3ms, american-fiction, pulitzer-prize, fiction-20th-century, read-2019, e-books, mtbr-challenge-2019

4* Angle of Repose
TR Crossing to Safety
TR The Big Rock Candy Mountain
TR The Spectator Bird

In this book, Lyman Ward, a wheelchair-using historian, describes the life of his frontier-era grandparents. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972.

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Sep 16, 2012 Lisa Kelsey rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-library

A great novel of The West, at times hard and dry like the landscape out there must have been in the latter half of the 19th Century, but well worth the extra time it took for me to read. Cutting through three generations, Angle of Repose is a story of a country and a culture coming of age as well as the adventurous saga of a family, replete with disappointments, betrayals and tragedies. Not for everyone, but I do recommend it highly for patient readers. I actually had to stop and copy some lines ...more

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