Angle of Repose
by Wallace Stegner
List Price: $13.95
Pages: 569
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 014016930X
Publisher: Penguin USA
Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa. The son of Scandinavian
immigrants, he traveled with his parents and brother all over the West—to
North Dakota, Washington, Saskatchewan, Montana, and Wyoming—before
settling in Salt Lake City in 1921. Many of the landscapes he encountered
in his peripatetic youth figure largely in his work, as do characters
based on his stern father and athletic, outgoing brother. Stegner received
most of his education in Utah, graduating from the University in 1930.
He furthered his education at the University of Iowa, where he received
a master's and a doctoral degree. He married Mary Stuart Page in 1934,
and for the next decade the couple followed Wallace's teaching career—to
the University of Wisconsin, Harvard, and eventually to Stanford University,
where he founded the creative writing program , and where he was to remain
until his retirement in 1971. A number of his creative writing students
have become some of today's most well respected writers, including Wendell
Berry, Thomas McGuane, Raymond Carver, Edward Abbey, Robert Stone, and
Larry McMurty.
Throughout his career and after,
Stegner's literary output was tremendous. His first novel, Remembering
Laughter, was published in 1937. By the time of his death in 1993
he had published some two dozen works of fiction, history, biography,
and essays. Among his many literary prizes are the Pulitzer Prize
for Angle of Repose (1971) and the National Book Award for
The Spectator Bird (1976). His collection of essays, Where the
Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (1992), was nominated
for the National Book Critics Circle award.
Although his fiction deals
with many universal themes, Stegner is primarily recognized as a writer
of the American West. Much of his literature deals with debunking myths
of the West as a romantic country of heroes on horseback, and his passion
for the terrain and its inhabitants have earned him the title 'The Dean
of Western Letters'. He was one of the few true Men of Letters in this
generation. An historian, essayist, short story writer and novelist, as
well as a leading environmental writer. Although always connected in people's
minds with the West, he had a long association with New England. Many
short stories and one of his most successful novels, Crossing to Safety,
are set in Vermont, where he had a summer home for many years. Another
novel, The Spectator Bird, takes place in Denmark.
An early environmentalist,
he actively championed the region's preservation and was instrumental—with
his now-famous 'Wilderness Letter'—in the passage of the 1964 Wilderness
Act. Honest and straightforward, educated yet unpretentious, cantankerous
yet compassionate, Wallace Stegner was an enormous presence in the American
literary landscape, a man who wrote and lived with ferocity, energy, and
integrity.
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