Angle of Repose (Modern Library)

by Wallace Stegner

An American masterpiece and iconic novel of the West by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner—a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past.

Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependant on others for his every need.  Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him.

• ISBN10: 1101872764
• ISBN13: 9781101872765
• Publish Date: 4 November 2014 (first published September 1971)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Vintage Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 672
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781101872765

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.”