Angle of Repose

Angle of Repose is a novel by the American writer Wallace Stegner, published in 1971 and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1972.

Lyman Ward is a historian in a wheelchair, estranged from his son and the rest of the family, who sets out to write the story of his grandparents. Susan Burling Ward came east for an education and a career as an illustrator and then married a mining engineer, and together they spent decades in the camps and hard towns of the American west while she wrote letters about what she saw. Stegner builds the novel out of those letters and out of Lyman's commentary on them, and the research becomes an inquiry into himself as much as into his grandparents, since his own marriage failed in ways he keeps half-seeing in theirs. A large part of the correspondence in the book is drawn from the published letters of a real nineteenth-century woman, and the use Stegner made of them has been discussed by scholars ever since.

Stegner taught for many years at Stanford and wrote about the American west in novels, stories and essays.