Angle of Repose

From Publishers Weekly It is at first disconcerting that the narrator sounds half the age of the author's narrator: Lyman Ward is an elderly, severely crippled historian at odds with his wife and children over his ability to live alone and write. But Mark Bramhall's comparative youth is soon forgotten as he leads us into the saga of intertwined generations. His pacing, his characterizations, and his convincing emotional repertoire embed us in this 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner that is in no way dated. Stegner's heroine is Ward's grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, a 19th-century writer and artist living in the rough mining towns of the West with her idealistic engineer husband. Bramhall's Susan is sometimes too girlish, but this, too, is a small matter; overall, he offers us a fine reading of a superb book. A Penguin Classics paperback. (Mar.) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Product Description Wallace Stegner's uniquely American classic centers on Lyman Ward, a noted historian, who relates a fictionalized biography of his pioneer grandparents at a time when he has become estranged from his own family. Through a combination of research, memory, and exaggeration, Ward voices ideas concerning the relationship between history and the present, art and life, parents and children, husbands and wives. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. The result is a deeply moving novel that, through the prism of one family, illuminates the American present against the fascinating background of its past. Review Brilliant...Two stories, past and present, merge to produce what important fiction must: a sense of the enhancement of life. --Los Angeles TimesWallace Stegner has written a superb novel, with an amplitude of scale and richness of detail altogether uncommon in contemporary fiction. --Atlantic MonthlyMasterful...Reading it is an experience to be treasured. --Boston Globe 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.