Angle of Repose
This novel by Wallace Stegner is based on the life of Lyman Ward’s grandmother and her attempt to adjust to life in the West in the late 1800s. Her name was Susan, and she had grown up in the East where she was becoming known for her book and magazine illustrations. Her closest friend was Augusta who was married to Thomas Hudson, a well-established literary critic and editor.
But Susan had to leave that life style when she married Oliver Ward, a mining engineer who had found work near San Jose, California. Susan was able to adjust to the small mining community, though when Oliver quit as foreman, they had to move in with a friend in nearby Santa Cruz. Later they followed a lead in Morelia, Mexico. They spent a number of months there but then returned to the western United States and worked in the mountainous town of Leadville, then the Boise Canyon, and finally retired in Grass Valley, California.
During these years, Susan and Oliver raised three children. At the same time, Susan kept working on stories and illustrations of her new environment that she sent back East to be published. However, her many letters to her friend Augusta give a clearer picture of her attempts to justify her new life.
Lyman Ward, a retired history professor and the narrator of the story, describes his grandparents as "...a woman who was more a lady than a woman, and a man who was more man than gentleman." But Lyman’s own life story parallels theirs in many ways, but not all. His wife left him after he had to have one leg amputated. Then he hired his neighbor Ada to make his meals and bathe him nightly in the house where his grandparents had spent their last years. He also hired Shelly, her free-thinking daughter, to help in the research of his grandmother.
Romance that leads to tragedy haunts Grandmother Susan when she and Oliver at last move to their Grass Valley home. But many years later, Lyman dreams he sees his "ex-grandmother and ex-wife side by side" in that house, as though they were two of a kind but several generations apart.
Wallace Stegner states at the beginning of Angle of Repose that he has mixed some historical facts and events with fiction in this story. A number of the characters he mentions were actually involved in mining or land development ventures in the West during the later 1800s, some of whom represented the government.
Angle of Repose was published in 1971 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Novels soon after.