Angle of Repose (Modern Library)

by Wallace Stegner

Jackson J Benson (Introduction)

An iconic novel of the American West — a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of the past

Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada. Living with a debilitating bone disease, he embarks on a search of monumental proportions, as he strives to rediscover the life of his grandmother – now long dead – who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier. But as he explores his grandmother's history, Lyman's great quest also leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life.

Winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Angle of Repose is Wallace Stegner’s masterpiece and a fascinating glimpse into frontier-era America.

With an Introduction by JACKSON J. BENSON

• ISBN10: 0141188006
• ISBN13: 9780141188003
• Publish Date: 30 March 2006 (first published September 1971)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
• Imprint: Penguin Classics
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 640
• Language: English

Reviews

[jamiereadthis]

This was lovely. It’s rich with beauty and ruin. There’s something missing from the heart of it, though, that was missing— for me— from the heart of Crossing to Safety too. Perhaps Stegner and I just aren’t soul mates, as much as I’d agree with him on the way the world works.

“My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandmother’s side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings.”