Synopses & Reviews
Angle of Repose tells the story of Lyman Ward, 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. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need, Ward is nonetheless embarking on a search of monumental proportions to rediscover his grandmother, now long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life.
Review
"Brilliant....Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enhancement of life." Los Angeles Times
Review
"Masterful....Reading it is an experience to be treasured." The Boston Globe
Review
"Cause for celebration....A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richenss of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction." The Atlantic Monthly
Review
"A fine novel, engrossing and mature...for when all is said individual lives are very much like bits of detritus, rolling down from the high places of stress and emotion until they reach that place where the tumpling and falling stops and they find their angle of repose. To chronicle this movement as well as this novel does is high art and first-rate writing." San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
Synopsis
Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. Through the prism of one family, this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past.
Synopsis
Four generations in the life of an American family are chronicled as retired historian Lyman Ward, confined to a wheelchair, decides to write his grandparent's history. The Pulitzer Prize-winning classic has been selected by the board of the Modern Library as one of the best hundred novels of the 20th century.
Synopsis
Wallace Stegner's Pultizer Prize-winning novel is a story of discoverypersonal, historical, and geographical. Confined to a wheelchair, retired historian Lyman Ward sets out to write his grandparents' remarkable story, chronicling their days spent carving civilization into the surface of America's western frontier. But his research reveals even more about his own life than he's willing to admit. What emerges is an enthralling portrait of four generations in the life of an American family.
About the Author
Wallace Stegner (1903-1993) was the author of many books of fiction and non-fiction, including the National Book Award-winning The Spectator Bird (1976) and Crossing to Safety. Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971.
Table of Contents
Part I
Grass Valley
Part II
New Almaden
Part III
Santa Cruz
Part IV
Leadville
Part V
Michoacán
Part VI
On the Bough