Angle of Repose [Paperback]

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.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

“Masterful...Reading it is an experience to be treasured.”—Boston Globe

“Brilliant...Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enhancement of life.”—Los Angeles Times

“Cause for celebration...A superb novel with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction.”—The Atlantic Monthly

Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels,Remembering Laughter,1937;The Big Rock Candy Mountain,1943;Joe Hill,1950;All the Little Live Things,1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal);A Shooting Star,1961;Angle of Repose,1971 (Pulitzer Prize);The Spectator Bird,1976 (National Book Award, 1977);Recapitulation,1979; andCrossing to Safety,1987. His nonfiction includesBeyond the Hundredth Meridian,1954;Wolf Willow,1963;The Sound of Mountain Water(essays), 1969;The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto,1974; andWhere the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Sprinl3