Awards
1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction
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
Wallace Stegner's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a story of discovery--personal, 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.