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Wallace Stegner and the Trap of Using Other People’s Writing

By Roxana Robinson

For years, troubling charges—appropriation, plagiarism—have hovered over Wallace Stegner’s famous novel, “ Angle of Repose ,” the story of a mining engineer and his wife living in the American West during the late eighteen-hundreds. There’s no question that Stegner used the life of the writer Mary Hallock Foote as the basis for his novel, nor that he used passages of her work without attribution, but at first few people knew it. In 1971, when Stegner’s novel was published, Foote’s memoir was unpublished. When her book came out the following year, Stegner’s novel had won the Pulitzer Prize, and it was protected by a halo of esteem.

But charges began emerging in the late seventies. In 2000, in an introduction to the novel, Jackson Benson, Stegner’s biographer, defended Stegner’s inclusion of thirty-eight passages from Foote’s letters, “approximately 61 pages,” all without attribution. It’s “a brilliant tactic,” Benson says, that creates “an invaluable part of the novel” and provides “depth and authenticity.” As to Foote’s life, Benson says the family had encouraged Stegner to use the material, believing that Stegner would tell the story of Foote’s productive career and happy marriage. In a preface, Stegner wrote, “This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.” But it was recognizably a family history—one that distorted the lives it described. More recently, a persuasive essay by Sands Hall , in the journal Alta , accuses Stegner of plagiarism, the appropriation of Foote’s life, and the slandering of her name. Instead of hewing to the historical facts, Stegner fabricates an adulterous liaison for the character based on Foote, a transgression that costs the life of a child and destroys her marriage. Some people who knew about Foote assumed that’s what happened in her own life, when it did not.

Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) grew up in a Quaker farming family near Poughkeepsie. She studied art in New York, at the Cooper Institute School of Design for Women, then married Arthur De Wint Foote. He was a mining engineer and they moved West to lead an adventurous life, in canyons and on mountainsides, in shacks and cabins, on the edge of the frontier. Mary was a perceptive observer, a compassionate friend, a loyal, intrepid wife, and a loving mother. She revelled in the beauty and accepted the hardships of her surroundings. She had her own career as a successful illustrator and writer, producing novels, stories, and the memoir. Her work was published in The Century Magazine and elsewhere. Stegner admired Foote’s fiction, and taught it to his creative-writing students. When he encountered her letters, he became intrigued, and asked the family for her unpublished memoir. He said he thought he could make something of it.

All fiction writers use some aspects from our own lives in our fiction, even if it’s only the weather. Many of us have written something based on a story we’ve heard. But there’s a difference between basing a novel on someone else’s story and using someone else’s written account of that story.

“Angle of Repose” has been called one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. I have never admired it. Much of the prose seemed dull and airless, the scenes quotidian, and the dialogue wooden. When I read Hall’s essay, I bought Foote’s memoir—“ A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West ”—and there it was: the origin of “Angle of Repose.” Scene after scene based on the main character—Mary Hallock Foote/Susan Burling Ward—comes directly from Foote’s memoir. Susan Burling Ward’s character is vivified and illuminated by Foote’s own writing; long passages taken from her memoir and letters provide a graceful counterpoint to Stegner’s often prosaic prose. Besides the memoir and letters, Mary’s short stories and travel pieces contain many precise details that Stegner borrowed. Mary Hallock Foote’s life and work were Stegner’s sources for his book. He was able to transcribe them, but he seemed to be unable to transform them through his own imagination.

When I saw the plodding precision with which Stegner had rewritten scenes that Foote had already described, I understood the lifelessness of his writing. When you’re writing your own fiction, it’s like taking a kayak down the rapids—you’re caught up in the current. But, if you’re rewriting someone else’s story, it’s like dragging a rowboat across a field. The characters can’t come alive because their lives are over. They’ve already said all they will ever say. The story is immovable. You’re trapped in sludge. Someone else created this, and all you’re doing is setting it down again. You try to put it into your own words, but it already exists in someone’s else’s. You are simply recording. You have become a stenographer.

I know because this happened to me. When I was writing my novel “Sparta,” about a Marine lieutenant coming home from Iraq, I read many first-person accounts of the war. Like Stegner, my only access to the world of my novel came from other people’s words; I couldn’t experience it myself. I found vivid accounts in blogs and memoirs, and I absorbed them greedily. Drawing on one, I wrote a scene about a platoon going out on patrol in the early dawn, walking down an Iraqi street and searching for I.E.D.s. As I wrote, I began to feel claustrophobic. The writing seemed leaden; in fact it was dead. I was transcribing someone else’s experience. It felt as though I were in a straitjacket. I had no room to move. I wasn’t imagining my own scene—I was setting down someone else’s. I had become a stenographer.

When Stegner read Foote’s letters and memoirs, they were unpublished and obscure. Virtually no one knew about them. They offered him a secret portal to a whole world. Here was an intelligent, sympathetic character, describing her life story in brilliant detail. It was like being in a dream. How could he not want to use this material? At the start, perhaps, he thought he would use only the idea. Perhaps he thought he would rewrite it in his own words, and this would make it his. Perhaps he thought that, as an established writer, he was somehow elevating her work by incorporating it into his. Perhaps he thought that, since she was a woman, her work was there for the taking. Perhaps he didn’t think about it at all.

The writer’s task is to set down words in a new way. Creating a memorable phrase, a sentence, a paragraph is our work. Using someone else’s words without credit, pretending you wrote it yourself, is theft. When I was writing my novel “Dawson’s Fall,” I again faced the problem of using the work of other writers. In this case, the characters were Frank and Sarah Dawson. They were my great-grandparents, so I felt I had a right to use their lives. But what about their writing? They were both copious letter writers and they both published Civil War memoirs. Frank was a newspaper editor, and wrote editorials for more than fifteen years, in the Charleston News and Courier , which he founded. I had hundreds of pages of their writing, much of it vivid, capturing their lives and the period. Like Stegner, I was fascinated by this window into the past. Like Stegner, I thought a novel could be made of the material.

Frank and Sarah wrote scenes that I wanted in my book. As the novelist, I tried to rewrite their accounts, but as I did so I felt the stenographer emerging. My prose became inert. Why should I retell their stories in my words, when they had told them so well in theirs? It seemed like a small crime to paraphrase them; also, I’d be robbing my book of good writing. For those scenes, I decided to use their words, taken verbatim from letters and diaries and editorials. Each time, I gave them credit. I called it a biographical novel. It was a novel because I created dialogue and internal monologues, but it was biographical because I stayed true to the facts, used real names, and identified the writers: these were actual people and good writers. So Sarah’s account of her father’s death and the shelling of Baton Rouge, and Frank’s love letters and his editorials appear in their own words.

I didn’t face Stegner’s temptation: I knew that other people knew about my sources, and much of the material had already been published. Stegner had reason to think that his source was known only to him and to Mary’s descendants. The memoir and the letters were then unpublished, and mostly still in family hands. The articles and stories had appeared decades earlier; Mary’s work seemed forgotten by the world. Stegner took whole passages of hers, sentence after sentence, written by Foote. Even his novel’s title comes from her short story “The Fate of a Voice.” The phrase appears in the story and is repeated in her memoir. “Angle of repose” is an engineer’s term, referring to the point at which mineral matter slides to a stop. “[It] was too good,” Foote writes in the memoir, “to waste on rockslides or heaps of sand.” Stegner found it too good to waste in an unpublished memoir.

What Stegner had forgotten is how much our words matter. All we do is set down words on the page. All we have, in the end, is our sentences. That’s our legacy. By claiming that hers were his, Stegner stole from Mary Hallock Foote’s legacy and contaminated his own. If those aren’t his sentences, then what has he left us?

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By Casey Cep

By Maggie Doherty

The New York Times

Opinionator | stegner’s complaint.

Stegner’s Complaint

PALO ALTO, Calif. — Wednesday was the centennial of Wallace Stegner , the writer and uber-citizen of the West. His friends said he looked like God ought to look, and perhaps not since Eden was first sketched in Genesis has an author been so sternly rhapsodic about the land.

Were Stegner around this week to blow out the 100 candles on his birthday cake, it’s likely he would still be mad at the East Coast Media Conspiracy, and by that he meant this newspaper.

“It was The New York Times that broke his heart,” said Nancy Packer, a retired professor of English at Stanford, who knew Stegner well in the time he nurtured writers from Ken Kesey to Larry McMurtry here on the Farm, as the university is known. Stegner won the National Book Award for “The Spectator Bird,” which The Times never reviewed. He also won a Pulitzer for his best-loved novel, “Angle of Repose,” which the paper only noticed after the award, and then with a sniff.

Even in anointing him the dean of Western writers, The Times couldn’t get his name right, calling him “William” Stegner. He died in 1993 at the age of 84.

Living and writing in the West, Stegner wrote, left him with the feeling that “I gradually receded over the horizon and disappeared.”

The fact that a writer of Stegner’s stature felt ghettoized with the dreaded tag of “regional author” raises the question of whether our national literature is too tightly controlled by the so-called cultural elite -– those people who talk to each other in some mythic Manhattan echo chamber.

Norman Maclean, the Montana native whose gin-clear prose makes “A River Runs Through It” an American treasure, certainly carried some of the Stegnarian chip on his Western shoulder.

After the success of his first book, Maclean was approached in 1981 by an editor at Knopf publishing, which had rejected the novel but was eager to take on his next project. Maclean wrote back in compacted fury.

“If the situation ever arose when Alfred A. Knopf was the only publishing house remaining in the world and I were the sole surviving author,” Maclean wrote, “that would mark the end of the world of books.”

Stegner felt similarly dissed, but he’s aged well — everywhere, perhaps, but Manhattan and Stanford, the cradle of the creative writing program he started.

I asked Tobias Wolff, the author of “This Boy’s Life,” and a former Stegner fellow who teaches at Stanford, if there was a class here devoted to his canon. After all, he wrote 35 books — novels, histories, short stories — and is the subject of two lengthy biographies, including Philip Fradkin’s recent tome , published by Knopf.

Wolff shook his head. “Generally, students don’t read him here,” he said. “I wish they would.”

Everywhere else, though, Stegner has grown in stature. For starters, there are rivers undammed, desert vistas unspoiled and forests uncut in the wondrous West because of his pen.

He influenced several presidents, from Kennedy to Clinton, to see that “something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” as he wrote.

How many writers of fiction can make that claim?

All over the West, Stegner centers, Stegner prizes and Stegner scholars produce work that follows his life theme: an attempt to get Westerners to make peace with their surroundings.

His prose was never Hallmark, and he was often blunt.

“The West is politically reactionary and exploitive: admit it,” he said in an interview. “The West as a whole is guilty of inexplicable crimes against the land: admit that, too. The West is rootless, culturally half-baked. So be it.”

This product of the hardscrabble, boom-and-bust, wandering man frontier — his dad made a living playing poker and selling bootleg liquor one year — has given us two of the most famous lines about the West. Both are grounded in optimism.

He called the West “the geography of hope,” despite many misgivings, and he dreamed of a day when Westerners would fashion “a society to match the scenery.”

Stegner certainly had the writerly credentials — Ph.D, a teaching stint at Harvard, short stories published in all the right journals read by all the right people. But he chose to make the cultural elite come to him.

And he grounded himself, spending nearly half his life in the Palo Alto foothills above Stanford.

On his 100th birthday, it’s worth remembering another lesson of his life — to choose authenticity over artifice. “If you don’t know where you are,” he said, paraphrasing the writer Wendell Berry, “you don’t know who you are.”

He knew — the where and the who.

Comments are no longer being accepted.

To idolatry! It’s time for me to revisit Big Rock Candy Mountain. What else?

I fell in love with Stegner’s writing after reading ‘Crossing to Safety.’ I live near where Stegner did, and I’m constantly arrested by all the beauty here. Reading him makes it come even more alive for me, and I wish I’d had the opportunity to meet him when he was still alive.

I’m an MFA student, and most of my very well-read peers have never read of him; some haven’t even heard of him. It’s such a pity, because there’s so much a writer can learn from him.

Thanks for this article.

I take your point, and I am fond of some of Stegner’s work, but I also think that every writer in America could make the case that he or she is a bit ignored or underrated or misapprehended. The land is big, and every vista looks different from every other. There is no spot in the US that epitomizes what it is to be American, and that is a wonderful thing about American literature. When I was growing up, it was all Faulkner and Fitzgerald, who made no sense to my young mind. The flip side of this “obscurity” is, for the reader, a repeated sense of discovery, not just of authors, but of places. That is our pleasure.

Absolutely, 100% accurate. As usual, Egan is right on the money. The EC media establishment has long snubbed some of America’s finest: McCarthy, Harrison, and as he mentions, McClean.

Stegner was one of the finest American writers. Ever.

He did fail to mentioned his other master-works: ‘Big Rocky Candy Mountain’, ‘Where The Blue Bird Sings to the Lemonade Springs’, ‘Crossing to Safety’. But then again, whats the point?

Kudos to you, Mr. Egan, for acknowledging this excellent but reliably dismissed writer. However, I have to say that the whole ‘we didn’t give Stegner his due’ thing seems like the literary equivalent of elitist white boy guilt. Just like white kids who grew up in Bushwick don’t seem to worry too much about their race’s past abuses, we westerners have always known Stegner for the patient thinker that he was, and never quite cared that the NYT ignored him—the Pulitzer and the National Book Award sorta made up for that anyway. Despite the odd Michener, even the folks on the frontier know good lit when they see it.

I’ve taught American Lit. at a variety of international high schools for over ten years. It has been essential for young Americans living abroad and non-Americans who attend these schools to fully understand the American experience; it cannot be done without teaching the literature of the American West. I don’t always need to teach Updike or Roth, but Stegner or McCarthy or Erdrich? Definitely. Isn’t it ironic that one of the great New Yorkers, Walt Whitman, could have such a powerful love of the entire country and celebrate it so forcefully; yet, today it seems others, like the Times, can’t share the wealth and the vision.

Good for you! Stegner truly deserves more respect, as do many other Western writers. Heyday Books in Berkeley recently published selected works from Stegner:

//www.heydaybooks.com/imprints/california-legacy/wallace-stegners-west-selected.html

But perhaps instead of complaining about East Coast gatekeepers, we in the West could create our own respected and well-read journals, newspapers and magazines for Western authors and anyone else. For example, the best writer on food right now is surely Michael Pollen (“The Omnivor’s Dilemma”), a journalism professor at U.C. Berkeley — so why do I read him only in the NYT and the New Yorker (in addition to Penguin, also in New York)? Because writers want to be read by as many people as possible.

Sure, those East Coasters should recognize us more. But we need equivalent literary venues here in the West.

Wasn’t it Stegner who hoped to see “a society to match the landscape” in the west?

I don’t think we’re there yet, but I think we’ve gotten both closer and further away.

Thanks for reminding me of his birthday.

“All over the West, Stegner centers, Stegner prizes and Stegner scholars produce produce work that follows his life theme”

Perhaps Stegner is rolling over in his grave that even now the when the New York Times recognizes him, they can’t avoid typos.

Seriously though, Mr. Egan seems to know great writing, as he mentions many of the greats including Maclean and Wendell Berry. If you haven’t read Tobias Wolff’s short stories, you are missing out. Stegner truly is the dean of western writing. I have never read a bad Stegner novel and I have read most of them.

“Were Stegner around….” We should be so lucky. Less that, we should read, heed, pay attention, listen up, look up, look out, and stand ground, OUR ground.

Stegner deserves better than this. Perhaps my favorite novel of all time is his “Crossing to Safety.” Stanford needs to give credence to the founder of its creative writing program, and the Times needs to recognize this foundational writer of the American West.

The Angle of Repose is my favorite book of all time. I believe I read it over 20 years ago and marveled at the character development. As an Easterner who has lived in Seattle for 25 years I too am aware of America’s split personality of so-called East coast sophistication and West coast genuineness. Although trained in the sciences, I had never really heard about the engineering term “angle of repose”. It would be interesting to learn how Stegner, as a creative writing instructor, came upon the term. The term relates to how high a pile of granular materials rise from the ground as a function of density, surface area and friction (answers.com). I remember one description in the book describing how a rock sliding down a mountain will stop at a certain point and come to rest, i.e. reach its point of equilibrium. Stegner was describing how humans find their own angle of repose in their jobs, locations and relationships. I have found that description of human endeavors to be as good as any I have heard.

That’s it? A man such as Stegner turns 100 and all the Times can muster is a snippet about how no one ever paid much attention to Mr. Stegner anyway. Although I dislike cliches, the more Times change, the more they stay the same.

In 1984, shortly after I began practicing water law, a fellow water attorney gave me Stegner’s “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” with the following words of encouragement inscribed: “I find this to be an excellent unveiling of the mystique of the west. Best wishes in your future battles with the water buffalos and the others who would perpetuate the myths of the land of Gilpin.” Since then, I’ve read other essays and novels by Wallace Stegner and I know of no writer who better articulated an ethic for living in and with the west (although Tony Hillerman, writing at a very different level, came close).

Thanks for remembering Stegner, my favorite writer and yes, my best-loved book is ‘Angle of Repose’. The hard times in ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ seem to be coming back to the suburbs of the West. Maybe things haven’t changed very much in 100 years, still all boom and bust.

I love the work of Wallace Stegner. I’ve read him steadily since college, grateful when his books were kept in print by University of Nebraska before they were reissued by Penguin. But I get awfully tired of hearing how neglected and ghettoized he was by the literary establishment. You want neglected, talk to African-American writers (with the exception of Toni Morrison), talk to gay and lesbian writers, talk to Latino writers. Other regions of American life are treated far worse than the West is.

Thank you, from a California native. I was first introduced to Stegner my junior year of high school when my English teacher made us read, “The Sense of Place,” which you quote at the end of the column. I’ll never forget that essay. It meant much more when I moved to New York state and left my home behind.

I respect Stegner, I just don’t reread him. He’s always there on the page, like Whitman and Emerson. Good company to be in, though I don’t reread them, either. There are few better writers, but many more engaging novelists. I can’t speak to the notion of an Eastern Establishment, but I’ve read widely. I’ve admired Stegner’s writing, but fiction, it seems to me, requires artifice as well as authenticity.

It may be, self-conscious authenticity is a feature of Western writing which I find most false, certainly when raised to the level of a nurtured grievance against all those Eastern writers who shut their ears against the traffic and create powerful works of imagination in their hovels, keeping out the cold by stuffing holes in windows and walls with old New York Times book reviews.

It’s a tragedy that people, particularly students, are not reading his work. He is one of the greatest of all time, and I consider Angle of Repose in the top 5 American novels catagory. And still the New York Times shrugs him off: the title of this section is “Outposts”, and the title of the Editorial is “Stegnar’s Complaint”, like he’s some kind of petulant backwater novelist crying for attention. Shamefull.

We don’t need Manhattan or the Times to confirm the value of Wallace Stegner. It would be good if they gave him even half of the recognition he deserves. Just read his works. The joy of his prose and the rhythm of his words is enough.

I read “Angle of Repose” in high school, and the novel made me appreciate the Western landscape and lifestyle in an entirely new way. A truly nice piece commemorating one of the West’s (and America’s) greatest authors.

Having read a substantial (twelve) number of WS’s books, I feel confident in saying: a minor writer who has earned a footnote in literary history here and here but who deserves his obscurity. Why does Mr. Egan not consider that a writer of Stegner’s “stature” might not deserve that stature; or that the East Coast elite (so-called) wasn’t acting conspiratorially; or that choosing “authenticity over artifice” (as reductive and silly a phrase as I’ve ever heard) is somehow worth (aesthetically) celebrating?

Centennials are meant to be celebratory (or at least commemorative) occasions, yes. Mr. Egan demonstrates, however, that they can degenerate into an exercise of “Look how misprized X was! How misunderstood!” I’ve looked over Mr. Egan’s past columns in the light of this idiotic one, and come to conclusion that his his aesthetic principles are as confused as his taste is bad. This ia literary-cultural critic The Times wants us (well, me) to take seriously?!

I once dated a man who shared my love of reading. I liked him very miuct, but I was pretty sure he was not the one. One day, his friend drove him by my apartment, where he placed Wallace Stegner’s book “Crossing to Safety” at my front door without comment stealing away into the sunshine. (So he thought; some visiting friends saw him through the window! They razzed me no end…) Without another word or date between us, I took the book with me to visit family in California. By the time I had read to the middle, my heart , like the West I suppose, was won. We will celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary this fall, and have three amazing boys. A man who revered Wallace Stegner was a man I could share my life with. He remains my truest friend and love. Happy Birthday Wallace.

I have lived most of my life in SoCal, Tex first 16. And wish to live nowhere else. I do believe all of the things Mr Stenger said about the land and us, especially rootlessness. Believe that LATimes is the best paper for me, NYTimes, the best all around paper,especially for medical news and business (Nocera)((go away Mr Slim)), wpost, third. We went thru this financial crisis in 89,90 with Wall St bungling using mortgages being bundled and derivatives, no change, it really got us this time. The NY, Boston, DC crowd is not America-a poor imitation. Neither are west coasters- lala landers. Real America is in the middle of this country, the only authentic Americans. Thanks, Mr Stenger, happy birthday.

It is impressive to me that even Stegner’s “minor works,” such as Wolf Willow, resonate with me decades after I first read them. Not much else I read 40 or 50 years ago still is as fresh as this morning.

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Puncturing The Myth Of the West

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By Dinitia Smith

• Sept. 8, 1997

Wallace Stegner, who died in 1993, was a writer of the American West who scorned the triumphal narrative of the lean hero riding into the wilderness and bringing civilization with him. The characters in Stegner's novels ''The Big Rock Candy Mountain'' and ''Angle of Repose,'' which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972, were often weak, tragic figures driven by flawed dreams for whom the conquest of the Western lands resulted in disaster.

''Wally poked a hole in the myth of the West,'' said the actor Robert Redford, a friend of Stegner, who is the executive producer and narrator of ''Wallace Stegner: A Writer's Life,'' an hourlong documentary to be seen tomorrow on many PBS stations. (Channel 13 in New York City will broadcast the program on Sunday at 7 P.M.) ''For Wally, the West was developed by a series of raids,'' said Mr. Redford, who has been an activist in conservation causes for 30 years.

Stegner's writing has been undergoing a revival of sorts in recent years. Viking Penguin has reprinted 12 Stegner titles, and last year he was the subject of a biography, ''Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work,'' by Jackson J. Benson (Viking). The new documentary, produced by Stephen Fisher in the last four years of the writer's life, was partly financed by Mr. Redford.

''Almost alone among major American writers of our time,'' Mr. Benson wrote in his biography, Stegner realized that the American ''dream has not only twisted our lives and corroded our values, it has despoiled the very land that has given us such hope.''

In many ways, Stegner's writing prefigured the thinking of so-called new historians like Patricia Nelson Limerick, a professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, who see the region in quite different terms from the historian Frederick Jackson Turner's vision of the land of unlimited opportunity.

''Mr. Stegner was willing to take tragedy into the picture,'' said Professor Limerick, who knew him. ''The view of Western history as a simple, linear story, in which Americans go west as leaders -- he refused that happy marketing route. He looked at failure. He showed how toxic dreams could be.''

His father's failures shadowed the son for the rest of his life. ''Stegner was probably the only important writer living into the 1990's who actually experienced the pioneering period of North American history, on the last unsettled frontier,'' Mr. Benson writes in his biography.

Wallace Stegner was born in 1909 in Lake Mills, Iowa. In 1914, his father, George, staked a homestead in Saskatchewan. Sleeping under a wagon with the wind hurling across the prairie at a hundred miles an hour, Wallace Stegner says in the documentary, taught him that ''the universe doesn't have any obligation to you.''

Stegner's writing was a constant revisiting of his own biography. His father was in many ways an archetypal Western adventurer, a bootlegger who invested in a series of failed mining claims, always in search of the lucky strike. He was a harsh, dominating man who dragged his family from town to town through North Dakota, Washington, Montana and Utah and always found failure. He eventually abandoned Wallace's mother, and in 1940, in a cheap hotel in Salt Lake City, he shot a female companion and then turned the gun on himself.

George Stegner became the model for Bo Mason in his son's book ''The Big Rock Candy Mountain,'' published in 1943, a novel about shattered hopes and about the influence that a father's story has upon his son. The book's title came from a hobo song about an imaginary land where all is beautiful and perfect. ''Oh lovely America,'' Wallace Stegner wrote, ''you pulled your tricks on us again.''

Eventually, he wrote himself out of his class, and out of the drifting life. A tall, handsome man, he graduated from the University of Utah and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Iowa. He taught English literature at the University of Wisconsin and was tenured at Harvard, where one of his students was Norman Mailer.

In 1945 he took a position at Stanford University, where he founded one of the country's first programs in creative writing. Among the students there were Robert Stone, Larry McMurtry and Ken Kesey.

Stegner's 1971 novel, ''Angle of Repose,'' is considered his masterpiece. Once again, it is a study of the way history continues to affect individual lives. The novel tells the story of Susan Burling, a well-bred 19th-century woman who marries Oliver Ward, an engineer who heads west with high hopes.

''Oliver Ward, as an engineer, is doing the ground-level work which will transform the Western paradise into a land of irrigated farms and quicksilver mines,'' Professor Limerick said. Inevitably, Oliver's dreams are vanquished. The novel is written from the point of view of Susan's grandson, Lyman Ward, in many ways a surrogate for Stegner himself, trying to understand his ancestors' story.

In addition to novels, Stegner wrote essays and biographies. He was the author of ''One Nation,'' an early study of race in the United States, published in 1945. He was also a biographer of John Wesley Powell, an explorer of the Colorado River, and of the critic and naturalist Bernard De Voto.

Stegner was always querulous about the radicalism of the 60's. Nonetheless, he became involved with conservation causes and was an advocate for the Wilderness Act of 1964. Mr. Redford met him at the dedication of Mount Ansel Adams at Yosemite National Park in 1985. The two were members of a group that lobbied to protect the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah from developers.

''There is the myth that there is all this space out there to be tamed by manifest destiny,'' Mr. Redford said. ''Now 100 years later, there is no more frontier.''

Stegner's last novel was ''Crossing to Safety,'' published in 1987. In it, he turned away from his major theme, the West, and told an intimate story of a friendship between two couples that spans the decades. ''I didn't know myself well,'' Stegner said in the documentary of his life. ''But I did know the people I loved and trusted.''

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If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

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ANGLE OF REPOSE

by Wallace Stegner ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 19, 1971

A late autumn retrospective, accomplished with a long lens, in which Lyman Ward, retired, ill and wheelchair-bound, attempts to affirm the continuity of the past and the "Doppler effect" of time by reconstructing his grandparents' lives. This in partial contrast to and rebuttal of his son at Berkeley "interested in change but only as a process. . . in values, but only as data" (the schism of his last book, All the Little Live Things). Much as one respects the amplitude of this novel and its sincerity, it all goes on and on (except for occasional present day interruptions) and one is never really very interested in Susan Burling Ward and her deracination from the cultured East to the uncivilized West in the 1870's by her husband, an engineer. It was always for her an "exile" and except for the terminal incidents ( a muted love affair which resulted in the accidental death of a child, her lover's suicide and permanent separation from her husband) there is almost no narrative incentive. The repose, however pleasant, becomes a kind of narcosis.

Pub Date: March 19, 1971

ISBN: 0141185473

Page Count: 486

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1971

LITERARY FICTION

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BOOK REVIEW

by Wallace Stegner

THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

by Claire Lombardo ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 25, 2019

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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SEEN & HEARD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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by Mark Z. Danielewski

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‘The Ways of Fiction Are Devious Indeed’

Finding current relevancy—and outrage—in the accusations of plagiarism that have long haunted a classic of the West: Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose .

We knew what we were there to talk about. It was an autumn evening, 1998, when we settled in around my large kitchen table. The artistic director of Nevada City’s Foothill Theatre Company, Philip Sneed, had invited core members of our company—director, costume and lighting designers, key actors, and me, as playwright—to spin ideas about creating a stage adaptation of one of the great American novels.

“Have you visited the North Star House?” Phil asked. “It’s exactly as Stegner describes it.”

“We should take a field trip,” said Tom Taylor, often our production manager. “Including the North Star Mining Museum.”

“Wait,” someone said. “You mean what Stegner in his novel calls Zodiac Cottage and Zodiac Mine are actually the North Star?”

Tom nodded. Born and raised in Nevada City—the heart of California gold country—he was deeply familiar with the region’s history. “Stegner didn’t just cutely rename the North Star House and the mine,” he said. “He based Susan and Oliver Ward on people who lived there, Mary and Arthur Foote—Arthur was superintendent of the North Star, as Lyman’s grandfather is of the Zodiac.”

Something flickered, but as a fiction writer myself, and the daughter of one, I knew that we often fold in the real with the invented. At the time, I was more concerned with how, as playwright, I’d handle Lyman Ward. After discovering that his wife is having an affair, Lyman, a historian, comes to terms with his own marriage by examining that of his grandparents. I found Lyman unappealing, both self-pitying—he’s lost a leg to a degenerative disease and must use a wheelchair—and full of diatribes against the youth of the ’60s, as personified in his holier-than-thou lefty son. To me, that amputated leg seemed like some bludgeoning effort of Stegner’s to indicate a “missing part,” emotional or otherwise. And the final scene of the novel was a dream , that most unforgivable of fictional devices—made even more so here by featuring the large and naked breasts of Lyman’s caretaker. But while Lyman was a clumsy framing device, I was keen to dramatize what was inside that frame—the life of Lyman’s grandparents, largely unfolded and reconstructed through his grandmother’s letters and reminiscences.

“You should all know,” Tom said, “that there’s a lot of local dudgeon aimed in Stegner’s direction. There’s a rumor he used Mary’s journal, or diary—”

This was met by a chorus of outrage: “There’s no way!” “We’re talking about Wallace Stegner!”

I was among those who found this absurd. Stegner, the revered novelist and environmentalist? The “dean” of western writers, founder of the eponymous writing program at Stanford? I’d met him a few times, at parties given by my parents in San Francisco, and been impressed by his sense of himself as Author, manifested in his height, his deep voice, that leonine head of white hair. He and my father, Oakley Hall, had a literary friendship. Dad, too, was a prolific novelist, the author of the Pulitzer Prize–nominated Warlock . Soaring arias often blared from Dad’s study as he wrote, and when, in 1976, San Francisco Opera produced an adaptation of Repose , it commissioned him to write the libretto. Although Stegner was 11 years my father’s elder, they both occupied a world that might be called patriarchal (well, one of them was my father) and certainly seemed unassailable: old, white, educated as well as brilliant—men. Aware as I was of the Problem with the Patriarchy, I was eager, with this project, to earn the approbation of that world, and those men.

“Still,” Tom insisted. “Since this is going to be a local production, it might be a good idea to look into this local controversy.”

With a lot of shrugging, and a feeling that our enthusiasm had been dented, we determined what we’d each do before our next meeting and adjourned.

Tom was my sweetheart at the time, and as we lay in bed that night, he told me that many locals believed there was more to what Stegner had done than any review of the novel had explored or presented. “He used the Footes’ entire lives.”

“Lots of historical novels do that,” I said. “Any biographical novel. Lust for Life , Van Gogh. The Agony and the Ecstasy , Michelangelo. What’s the big deal?”

Tom was stubborn. “Why doesn’t he use their names? Why name them Ward? Also, I gather he used some of her writing.”

I found myself shrugging. The derivation of the word fiction is form . Stegner formed his astonishing novel from the materials he had. That’s what fiction writers do .

Nevertheless, it bothered me.

It bothered me in 1998, and it more than bothers me now. For far too long, the accomplishments of women have been attributed to men: F. Scott Fitzgerald appropriated Zelda Fitzgerald’s writing. Rosalind Franklin was denied the recognition—and the Nobel Prize—for helping discover DNA. Margaret Keane’s husband took credit for her big-eyed paintings. And although I didn’t know it at the time, I was about to wade into the long-standing case of literary license taken by one of the West’s preeminent male writers, whose most heralded work won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction exactly 50 years ago. Might Stegner’s literary legacy begin to shift in the era of #MeToo? Especially given the ongoing debate (a debate that I am, in fact, remarkably ambivalent about) regarding who has the right to tell another’s story.

But lying there beside Tom, plotting how to successfully bring Angle of Repose to the stage, I brushed away the idea that Stegner might be one of those men who’d arrogate a woman’s work as his own. How could that be the case with the characters who dominate his novel? The Wards are perpetually on the move as Oliver’s career as a mining engineer takes him to California and Mexico and Colorado. They hang out with historical luminaries like geologist Clarence King and author Helen Hunt Jackson. Not to mention that tragic, awful decade in Boise, Idaho, as Oliver tries and fails to bring water to arid lands. Of course Stegner had invented those extraordinary lives and those bold, courageous characters. All that couldn’t possibly be real.

A few days after that first meeting, Lynne Collins, slated to direct the adaptation, dropped by. “I was at Harmony Books, buying a new copy of Angle of Repose , and look what I found.”

She handed me a trade paperback: A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote . On the cover was a drawing of a woman in a Victorian dress waiting by empty train tracks, a pile of luggage beside her, including a long cylinder that might hold maps or plans. Published by the Huntington Library Press.

“It was shelved right next to Angle of Repose ,” Lynne said. “Quite purposefully. So maybe there is some local connection there.”

“Interesting.” I leafed through pages that held photographs as well as drawings—clearly, Mary Foote, like Stegner’s Susan Ward, had been a talented illustrator. I put it on my desk next to my edition of Angle of Repose , which, published by Penguin, was in its zillionth printing. Above the title: “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.”

Late that afternoon, feeling dutiful, I sagged into an armchair and opened Reminiscences to Book 1, “Quaker Beginnings.” I was immediately struck by Foote’s writing: “There were dark winter mornings when we woke as it were in the night,” she writes of being a child during an upstate New York winter, “in a room where an airtight stove blared away with the draft open, panting and reddening on its legless feet.”

Her writing was bright and joyous and beautifully detailed. But within a dozen pages, for other reasons, I was sitting up straight, spine tingling.

Mary Hallock Foote and Susan Burling Ward had far too much in common. Both were raised as Quakers in Milton, New York. Both attended Manhattan’s Cooper Union School of Design for Women in 1864. Both began their careers as illustrators, contributing to books by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Both married brilliant mining engineers, one named Arthur, the other Oliver. During their time at the New Almaden Mine in California, Mary/Susan wrote vivid letters to their dear friends Helena/Augusta, whose husbands, editors of the Century Magazine , asked to publish their correspondence, thus launching Mary/Susan’s writing careers. They went on to publish novels, story collections, and essays. Eventually, both women, each with three children, spent an achingly difficult decade outside Boise as their husbands pursued their vision of a vast irrigation system called the Big Ditch.

More disturbingly, I kept reading phrases and descriptions that felt familiar.

And then, on page 97, I came across this passage (ellipses mine, to give a sense of the whole):

And then Helena dawned on my nineteenth year like a rose pink winter sunrise, in the bare halls of Cooper, sweet and cold after her walk up from the ferry.… Across the city we came together and across the world in some respects.… Her sharings in books and friends were the stored honey of my girlhood.… Salt is added to dried rose leaves with the perfume and spices when we store them away in covered jars, the summers of our past.

The hair stirring on my arms, I reached for the novel. Yes. There it was, page 33: “And then Augusta dawned on my nineteenth year…sweet and cold from her walk up from the ferry” (ellipsis Stegner’s). The passage carries on for an entire page—with negligible alteration. I’d assumed Stegner had come up with that elegant, time-specific metaphor—the bitterness of salt and the beauty of roses in making potpourri—but clearly it was Foote’s.

I looked for an acknowledgment from Stegner, an endnote, and found an author’s note:

My thanks to JM and her sister for the loan of their ancestors. Though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.

“Selected facts”? (And who was “JM”?) Scene after scene drawn directly from Reminiscences shows up in Repose , as do many lengthy verbatim quotes. Troublingly, even as Stegner uses Foote’s descriptions and insights, he subtly yet thoroughly denigrates her character. While Foote in her writings emerges as lively and game, eager to engage with wherever her husband’s engineering interests and career might take them, Lyman Ward hints, leeringly, that his grandmother is more in love with Augusta than with Oliver. Susan finds endless fault with her husband and the cross-country traipsing intrinsic to the life of a mining engineer.

Stegner, an ardent scholar of the West (his biography of John Wesley Powell should be required reading for those living, as the title describes it, “beyond the hundredth meridian”), gives that historical expertise to his narrator, Lyman. It’s a clever literary sleight of hand, as it’s Lyman who creates scenes based on—and uses entire passages lifted from—his “grandmother’s unpublished reminiscences.” And I could not help but notice that Lyman quotes, also extensively, from the letters Susan writes to Augusta. Surely, surely , Stegner had written those?

Again, I turned to Tom, who, with his 50-year knowledge of the community, put me in touch with Tyler Micoleau, the widower of one of Foote’s granddaughters, Janet—the JM of Stegner’s author’s note. Tyler was delighted that I was looking into an issue that had infuriated the Foote family for decades. He offered folders of documents, including letters from Stegner to Janet. He also informed me that a great number of the Foote family’s papers, including Mary’s letters to Helena—lent to a student of Stegner’s and never returned—were now stored at the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford University.

Galvanized, I raced to Palo Alto.

I may have felt I was pickaxing into new territory, but since Repose ’s 1971 publication, controversy has churned around Stegner and his novel. However, as those objections have been confined largely to academic circles, they’ve seldom reached those who for decades have read and adored the book.

Stegner appears to have become aware of Mary Hallock Foote’s writing in the late 1940s; by the end of the next decade, he is teaching her stories at Stanford. One of Stegner’s graduate students, George McMurry, interested in pursuing a dissertation on MHF, as she is known, tracks down her descendants in Grass Valley. In a 1957 letter to Stegner, his thesis adviser, McMurry writes that he met with Janet and Tyler Micoleau and they gave him “two more [emphasis mine] cartons each as big as the one in the Felton Room of prime MHF material, including nearly 200 of her sketches, all her press clippings, reviews and family and fan letters.” McMurry’s own letters demonstrate that he is entranced by MHF: he’s collecting her out-of-print novels, working on a biography, and transcribing the letters loaned to him by the Micoleaus.

In March 1957, Stegner asks to meet with MHF’s family “about your grandmother.” They lend him some manuscripts of her stories. As he returns these, Stegner writes that he’s encouraging McMurry to finish MHF’s biography, as well as his editing, “for parallel publication,” of the reminiscences.

Ten years pass. In August 1967, Stegner writes to the Micoleaus that McMurry “has got pretty old” and the biography isn’t going to happen. “He has given me his typescripts of the letters, however, and I have been reading them, and I see why the letters excited him.” While Stegner isn’t interested in writing a biography of MHF, he can see that “out of [their] so-typical and so-comprehensive life,” he “might work out the outlines of a big western novel of a kind” he has “not yet seen written.” He continues:

Since it would involve no recognizable characterizations and no quotations direct from the letters I assume this sort of book is more or less open to me.

In a P.S. he asks, “Do you know the location of your grandmother’s reminiscences?”

That October, he thanks Janet for sending the reminiscences. “Quite a book, really,” he writes. “And quite a life. I’m all the more persuaded that it ought to be worked into something, and I’m all the more eager to try to do it.”

Then, silence.

Meanwhile, James D. Hague, the grandson of Arthur’s brother-in-law, encourages the Huntington Library Press to publish MHF’s reminiscences, which it enthusiastically agrees to do. And in March 1970, Janet receives a slightly panicky letter from Stegner: “Probably you thought I was dead, paralyzed, struck dumb, or otherwise incapacitated. I am none of those. I am only slow as a sinful conscience.” What sins might be plaguing him, he leaves her to guess.

He’s just heard about the forthcoming publication. “Me, I think it’s a splendid idea,” he writes.

But…must I now unravel all those little threads I have so painstakingly ravelled together, the real with the fictional, and replace all truth with fiction? Or does it matter to you that an occasional reader or scholar can detect the Footes behind my fictions?

The news of the imminent publication of MHF’s writings must have been unsettling. As long as there was no copyright, Stegner was within his legal rights to borrow from them freely. Above all, though, to “unravel” those “little threads” would have destroyed the novel.

“For reasons of drama,” he writes, “…I’m having to throw in a domestic tragedy of an entirely fictional nature. But I think that I’m not too far from their real characters.”

Alerted to Reminiscences ’ impending publication, he seems in a headlong rush to put his novel to bed: only a month later, he writes to Janet that he’s nearing completion.

Do you want to read this fat 600-page manuscript when it’s finished, or would you rather wait till I can send it to you in print? As I have already warned you, it wouldn’t do to look for your grandparents’ lives in it; only a sort of outline, and flashes, all of it bent when I needed to bend it.

We don’t have Janet’s reply, but it’s clear she demurred from reading that “fat” manuscript. And so the novel is published with the “threads” intact.

That was 1971. Reminiscences was published in 1972—the same year that Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize.

I spent three days at Stanford studying Foote’s letters and family ephemera. In the evenings, I visited my parents in their San Francisco flat, whose living room windows encompassed a spectacular view, from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate. As we watched the setting sun flicking with gold the dark water, the talk naturally swirled around Stegner.

“Foote’s Reminiscences had no copyright when Stegner used them,” my father said. “He’s legally within his rights.”

“ ‘Legally,’ ” I repeated, appalled that my father was offering the same excuse routinely offered by Stegner and his other defenders.

Dad chuckled. “On a related note? The editor of Warlock chided me about Goodpasture’s journals.” Henry Goodpasture, a character in Dad’s novel, owns the local mercantile; at night, he ruminates in his journal—wonderful, wise passages about how law must necessarily follow the desire for order that’s developed among his fellow citizens in the town of Warlock.

“My editor thought those journals were real. He pretty much shouted at me, ‘You can’t use journals written by somebody else!’ ”

I stared. “Exactly, Dad! That’s what Stegner’s done! Why are you defending him?” My mother and I both looked at him, waiting. He looked sad. “The man was my friend.”

That sentence would stick with me.

Back home, I shared my outrage with Tom and Lynne. “I don’t know how we can possibly give him more credit,” I said. But I had yet to articulate any of this to the rest of the group, especially artistic director Philip Sneed. Instead, I dove further into research.

In his Conversations with Wallace Stegner , historian Richard Etulain dedicates a chapter to Repose , and Stegner is often defensive. It “has nothing to do with the actual life of Mary Hallock Foote except that I borrowed a lot of her experiences,” he tells Etulain. And the Mary Foote “stuff” (his word) “had the same function as raw material, broken rocks out of which I could make any kind of wall I wanted to.”

Contemporary reviewers and writers—with few exceptions, men—defend Stegner with the “no copyright” argument or by insisting, as Stegner himself did, that the family gave him permission. But that permission, if it was indeed granted, seems to have been secured under false pretenses. There’s that 1967 letter, in which he tells Janet that the novel would involve no direct quotations; in 1970, he assures her that “it wouldn’t do to look for your grandparents’ lives in it; only a sort of outline.”

For many, the only excuse needed is that Stegner created a great work of art.

But whose work of art is it, really? When Repose was released, the New Yorker described the Wards’ “triumphantly American Odyssey.” The New Statesman wrote that Susan is the book’s “great strength”; the Atlantic praised Stegner’s ability with voice, especially Susan’s, “in letters that are a triumph of verisimilitude.”

Verisimilitude.

It’s plagiarism.

Yet in the end, it wasn’t that Stegner copied so much, verbatim, that incensed me. Nor that, in creating the Wards, he followed so precisely—for 523 of the novel’s 569 pages—the trajectory of the Footes’ lives. It was that, in the process, he altered Mary’s character. Susan emerges as a griping, entitled, discontented 1950s housewife, nothing like the adventurous, deeply intelligent, resilient woman on whom she was modeled.

My outrage on MHF’s behalf became a living, writhing thing; I was both fish—pulled along by the information I was finding—and fisherperson, casting hook after hook into waters into which I’d inadvertently waded. I felt I was doing the most important work of my life—a feeling that has not left me. My fury surprised me, but as I located its sources, it grew: I was angry at how, for centuries and across cultures, men have demeaned women; I was angry at their entitlement; I was angry at language in which “bitch” belittles both female dogs and female humans, and that unexplored lands are called “virgin territory.” I was angered by how often God is defined as male and that so much destruction and violence is committed in, and justified by, his name. Stegner didn’t physically assault Mary Foote, but he abused her—her life, her writing, and, as it turned out, her reputation. And he got away with it because he was a man. A privileged, white, older man. Would he have used the journal and letters of a male writer in this way?

Fifty pages from the end of the novel, Stegner, in his guise of Lyman Ward, writes:

Up to now, reconstructing Grandmother’s life has been an easy game. Her letters and reminiscences have provided both event and interpretation. But now I am at a place where she hasn’t done the work for me.… I have to make it up.

And “make it up” Stegner does. Susan and one of Oliver’s assistants, Frank Sargent, have an affair. While Susan is thus distracted, her toddler, Agnes, drowns. Sargent blows his brains out. Oliver refuses to speak to Susan for the rest of their lives.

This is Stegner’s “domestic tragedy.” This is the part of the Footes’ lives he “bent when [he] needed to bend it.” While also telling the family, “But I think that I’m not too far from their real characters.”

Stegner had a good sense of what he was doing. In 1971, he sent Janet a copy of the published novel “with trepidation.”

You may have expected me to stick to your grandmother’s real life and character. And that I found I was unable to do. I had to warp it—it warped itself.… In effect [I] make your grandmother bolster with her authentic letters the false portrait I am painting of her. The ways of fiction are devious indeed.

After he blasts their lives apart, Stegner returns the Wards’ story to his source material. The Footes (speaking) and the Wards (not) land a house and a job in Grass Valley: brothers-in-law Hague/Prager hire Arthur/Oliver to run a mine. For the Wards, it’s the Zodiac; for the Footes, the North Star.

In 1971, when Repose was published, many recognized the arc of the Footes’ lives. The couple’s daughter Agnes—the only Foote family name Stegner did not change—had also died young, at 18, of pneumonia. Those readers naturally assumed that Mary had had an affair and that she and Arthur lived in bitter silence out there at the North Star. Later, in what the Foote descendants apparently felt was a direct response to having opened the door to Stegner, Janet Micoleau suffered a nervous breakdown. Her nephew, Bob, who struggled with mental illness but for years worked as a docent at the North Star Mining Museum—commandeering the attention of anyone who visited with the story of the vast disservice done to his great-grandparents—died by suicide.

It’s quite the Möbius twist: Those who don’t know Stegner’s sources—the Footes’ remarkable story; his copious use of MHF’s letters and reminiscences—assume he wrote every word. Those readers who do know that the novel is based on the Footes’ lives, and that so much of the writing is Mary’s, assume Stegner told their “real” story: adultery, infanticide, a destroyed marriage.

The Foothill Theatre Company did not produce an adaptation of Angle of Repose . Neither Lynne nor I wanted to put our shoulders to that wheel. Phil was disappointed. But he took our concerns seriously. As the years have gone by, I’ve come to appreciate that he didn’t seek out another writer and director, which he could easily have done.

What I could imagine, I told him, was a meeting between Stegner and Foote. What would she say to him? How would he defend himself? I wanted to hear that conversation. The ideal place for such an encounter was the “ether” that theater provides.

A few months later, Phil called. “That idea you have,” he said. “Let’s apply for an NEA grant and see what might come of it.”

What came of it was Fair Use , the title a copyright term. My father’s phrase, “The man was my friend,” ended Act I and helped create the character Playwright, who, struggling in her marriage, stays with her divorced historian father. Historian happens to be a grateful student and friend of WS—who has a lot of similarities to Stegner. And MHF, penning letters and reminiscences, observes how WS, even as he uses her life and her writing to compose a novel, dramatically alters the climax of that life and, in the process, her entire character. Two actors play Mary/Susan and Arthur/Oliver, turning on an often-comedic dime to deliver those differences.

Fair Use premiered in 2001. Lynne directed. Phil, also an actor, played WS; I played MHF. Opening night, a few minutes into the play—as WS types what MHF writes—a man in the audience blurted, “Oh my God. He really did it!”

Stegner really did. But when there’s rape and murder and climate change and voter suppression, a certain “so what?” factor can emerge around plagiarism. It’s what he did to Mary’s life that fascinates and appalls, and that’s what drove me in the writing of the play. In choosing to climax the story of the Wards in a romantic tryst gone terribly wrong, Stegner not only “warped” the Footes’ story; he missed the opportunity to unfold the remarkable final act of their lives. Years after they’d “anchored at the North Star,” MHF writes, “deep in deep mining…the old Idaho dream came back to us with its sound of wild waters between dark basalt bluffs that cut the sky.” Arthur’s assistant Wiley, still in Idaho, had sent them a news clipping:

A quarter of a century ago Arthur Foote…saw where water could be diverted; he saw where it could be stored, and, in the reach of his precise imagination, he could see these lands peopled with thousands of prosperous families.

Although it took the force and wealth of the U.S. government to make it happen, Arthur’s Big Ditch was finally finished. Three thousand people lined the banks to see it open. The entire area continues to this day to be watered by Arthur’s vision.

In our current era, Stegner’s warping of the very nature of the woman who recorded so vividly her exceptional life pulses with startling relevance. Foote was a fellow writer; Stegner taught her stories. Clearly, he admired her writing enough to know he could not do better, and so he lifted it outright. I imagine him with piles of transcripts beside his typewriter, typing page after page into his manuscript, words he did not write. How did he justify it?

In that 1971 letter to Janet, Stegner ends: “Wonderful. I feel like a character in literary history.” He did not mean being famous, but that what he’d done would catch up to him. It’s time it did. It’s possible to salute Stegner as a writer while acknowledging the devious skill he used in creating this novel.

Looking back on that bleak decade in Boise while they were working on the Big Ditch, MHF recalls sitting with her husband and his assistants:

Often I thought of one of their phrases, “the angle of repose,” which was too good to waste on rockslides or heaps of sand. Each one of us…was slipping and crawling and grinding along seeking what to us was that angle, but we were not any of us ready for repose.

It was MHF who observed the fineness of that life metaphor; Stegner stole that from her as well, as the title of his novel. He has Lyman define it as “Horizontal. Permanently.” But that hopelessness, that fatalism, is not Mary’s.

I suppose that’s what I want for her: a repose that has to do with reclaiming the life that Stegner took from her.

We have a word for the theft of writing; we do not have one for a stolen life.•

Sands Hall is an author, musician, and theater artist.

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'Crossing to Safety': Wallace Stegner's poignant classic turns 25

Wallace Stegner's novel about a decades-long friendship between two couples is just as rewarding on its 25th anniversary as it was when first published.

• By Heller McAlpin Barnes
• Noble Review

December 7, 2012

It's a good time of year to lose yourself in an absorbing, transportive story that has nothing topical, tropical, stormy, or smarmy about it. Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) may be better known for his 1972 Pulitzer Prize -winner, "Angle of Repose," but it's his last novel, "Crossing to Safety," which quietly celebrated its 25th anniversary this year, that keeps drawing me back. This is the kind of book – the apt first selection for Will Schwalbe's "The End of Your Life Book Club,"   by the way – that reminds you why reading is such a wonderful solace and escape.

Achingly poignant and nostalgia-steeped, "Crossing to Safety" is about a close friendship between two couples that spans some forty years, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do them part. Taking its title from a line from Robert Frost 's poem, "I Could Give All to Time,"  the novel's concerns are the inexorable passage of time and inevitable loss, but also what one holds onto – "The things forbidden that while the Customs slept I have crossed to Safety with" – most notably, memories (both heartwarming and difficult), and love.  

The two couples meet during the Depression on a college campus in Madison, Wisconsin , where both men – one a wealthy but middling would-be poet, the other a dirt-poor but highly talented aspiring novelist – are happy to have landed hard-to-come-by academic jobs as instructors in the English department. Their pregnant wives hit it off, and the exuberant, dazzling wealthier couple, Charity and Sid Lang, take Sally and Larry Morgan under their munificent wings, helping them out repeatedly in times of trouble, and exposing them to a world they never knew existed.

The beating heart of that world is Battell Pond, the Lang's "discreet and understated" family compound in Vermont , like something "out of a Hudson River School painting, uniting the philosophical-contemplative with the pastoral-picturesque." It is the antithesis of a trophy property, where even conveniences as basic as telephones are eschewed with a self-imposed austerity. Stegner nails the "simplicity expensively purchased and self-consciously cherished, a naturalness as artificial as the Petite Trianon" that characterize such enclaves of Old Money, rich in simple pleasures. But, as in Poussin's 17th-century pastoral painting, even in Arcadia, there is death. 

Stegner's alter-ego novelist, Larry, narrates the story of this lifelong friendship, which is not without its tensions. The novel opens with the Morgans' return to Battell Pond after what we learn is an eight-year absence. The time is August, 1972, and Larry, whose successful literary career has more than fulfilled expectations, is now 64. He and his wife, long hobbled in body but not spirit by polio, have been summoned back from their retirement home in New Mexico to "the place where during the best time of our lives friendship had its home and happiness had its headquarters."

They have come, despite the hardship of the trip for Sally with her cumbersome leg-braces and crutches, because their dear, imperious, generous, captivating, and exasperating friend Charity is dying of cancer. Entirely in character, she wants to stage her exit with the same rigorous control with which she organized picnics, her husband's disappointing career, her children's lives, and everything else. (The couples' offspring, by the way, are conveniently peripheral through much of the action, left with caregivers for stretches of time likely to astonish modern-day sensibilities.)  

After setting the scene, Larry circles back to the 1930s, when the two families met, and then works his way back to the novel's present, 1972. The circular structure is significant, for as Stegner writes, "In fact, if you could forget mortality, and that used to be easier here [at Battell Pond] than in most places, you could really believe that time is circular, and not linear and progressive as our culture is bent on proving." What does Stegner mean by this? He pans out for a broader, more expansive view that reflects his deep connection with the natural world, which fueled his passionate, early championing of environmentalism: "Seen in geological perspective, we are fossils in the making, to be buried and eventually exposed again for the puzzlement of creatures of later eras... Here everything returns upon itself, repeats and renews itself, and the present can hardly be told from past." Readers may recognize a shared sensibility with Jim Crace 's "Being Dead," which chronicles in luminous prose what happens to the bodies of a middle-aged married couple murdered on a beach just as they are reconnecting with their old passion for each other. Crace's unusual narrative is very different from Stegner's but still highly recommended for another stirring yet quiet read grounded in an appreciation for nature.

So many of Stegner's lines invite discussion, and so many of the narrator's remembered events, occurring "at a time in our lives when the smallest pebble on the track could derail us," were pivotal: "I never heard of anybody's life but ours being changed by a dinner party," he writes. As for young promise: "Talent lies around us like kindling waiting for a match, but some people, just as gifted as others, are less lucky. Fate never drops a match on them.

Of course there is a snake in the grass in this luxuriantly evoked Eden – or rather, several. One is the polio virus that attacks Sally. More troubling, the Langs' marital dynamic creates disturbances which ripple out and threaten to swamp them all. Sid's need for "direction and reassurance" and Charity's compulsion to take charge result in a level of henpecking that becomes increasingly uncomfortable for the Morgans. When the Langs' daughter urges Larry to write about her parents, hoping he can explain their warped relationship and why they have stayed together, he responds that writers "don't understand any more than other people. They invent only plots they can resolve. They ask the questions they can answer." We readers are of course shaking our heads – for in "Crossing to Safety" Stegner has raised numerous questions not just about the Langs' marriage, but about loyalty, love, and the most beautiful sort of longterm caring – questions without easy answers.

Part of the wonder of this book is the high level of dramatic tension Stegner manages to render from essentially quiet lives. Compared to the reams written about romantic or family relationships, surprisingly little ink has been spilled about lifelong, life-changing friendships. Alice Mattison 's "When We Argued All Night" is a recently published novel about friends whose close connection mutates and endures through decades of political upheavals. I'd be interested to hear from readers about some of their favorite books that involve going the distance – crossing to safety – with old comrades and kindred spirits.

Heller McAlpin is a New York -based critic who reviews books for NPR.org, The Los Angeles Times , Washington Post , San Francisco Chronicle , The Christian Science Monitor, and other publications.

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Angle of Repose (Stegner)

Angle of Repose Wallace Stegner, 1971 Penguin Group USA 392 pp. ISBN-13: 9780141185477 Summary   Angle of Repose tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history and author of books about the Western frontier, who returns to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, in the Sierra Nevada. Wheelchair-bound with a crippling bone disease and dependent on others for his every need, Ward is nonetheless embarking on a search of monumental proportions—to rediscover his grandmother, now long dead, who made her own journey to Grass Valley nearly a hundred years earlier. Like other great quests in literature, Lyman Ward's investigation leads him deep into the dark shadows of his own life. More Wallace Stegner has said of his epic novel, "It's perfectly clear that if every writer is born to write one story, that's my story." It is a testament to the power of Stegner's prose and vision that Angle of Repose , winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, can be appreciated as America's story as well. Based on the correspondence of the little-known 19th century writer, Mary Hallock Foote, the novel's heroes represent opposing but equally strong strains of the American ideal. Susan Burling Ward is refined, educated, and strong-willed. Her husband, Oliver, is a handsome adventurer of cruder habits, who brings a pistol when he comes courting, yet who is humbled in the presence of Susan's sophistication. As we follow Susan on her first journey across the young country—"not to join a new society but to endure it"—we experience the West through the eyes of a true easterner, horrified at the lack of culture, the quickly fabricated cities, the dust, dirt and heat. Susan eventually finds herself able to appreciate the raw beauty of her new surroundings, and is even successful in building comfortable homes for her family. Yet throughout her married life she defines herself through her east coast roots, debating Oliver's worthiness as a husband and provider, and assessing what she has given up in exchange for a life of adventure and uncertainty. In Susan and Oliver's numerous disappointments and incidents of misfortune we find Stegner exposing the myth of America's west as a land of golden opportunity and fearless cowboys. It is a theme we find in many of his novels, along with a passionate appreciation of the western landscape. Indeed, Stegner's most magnificent writing can be found in his descriptions of the mountain peaks, deep canyons, winding ravines, and vast stretches of plain and prairie. The terrain becomes a character in its own right, deserving of fear and respect, forcing its will on the people who carve their homes out of its resistant rock and soil. But we must not label Stegner merely a regional writer. To do so would overlook his technical brilliance, which shines through in this novel in his choice of narrator: retired historian Lyman Ward, whose degenerative bone disease has confined him to a wheelchair and left him unable to move his head from side to side. Lyman's literal tunnel vision elucidates the figurative—as an historian he looks to the past, and as a disillusioned husband and father, he finds solace in it. But, as he discovers in the course of researching his grandmother's biography, even he cannot escape the present and some measure of self-examination. Without Lyman's narrative input, Susan Burling Ward's story would have flattened into epic melodrama; his perspective broadens the novel's scope, and enables us to draw parallels between Susan's life and his own, between her century and ours. Although the term 'angle of repose' refers to a resting point, Stegner's novel, if nothing else, helps us recognize America as a nation in constant flux, engaged in incessant struggle between east and west, between young and old, between myth and reality, between reaching for one's dreams, and settling for less. Angle of Repose was written during a time of tremendous political and social upheaval in America, and Lyman's frequent reflections on the era create much of the tension in the novel. Yet some twenty years after its publication the character's personal histories continue to be relevant and edifying. They are America's stories, part of her past and present—undoubtedly part of her future. ( From the publisher .)

Author Bio   • Birth—February 18, 1909 • Where—Lake Mills, Iowa, USA • Death—April 13, 1993 • Where—Sante Fe, New Mexico • Education—B.A., University of Utah; Ph.,D., State University   of Iowa. • Awards—Pulitzer Prize for Angle of Repose, 1972; National   Book Award for The Spectator Bird, 1977 Some call Wallace Stegner "The Dean of Western Writers." He was born in Lake Mills, Iowa and grew up in Great Falls, Montana, Salt Lake City, Utah and southern Saskatchewan, which he wrote about in his autobiography Wolf Willow. Stegner says he "lived in twenty places in eight states and Canada". While living in Utah, he joined a Boy Scout troop at a Mormon church (though he was not Mormon but Presbyterian himself) and earned the Eagle Scout award. He received his B.A. at the University of Utah in 1930. He taught at the University of Wisconsin and Harvard University, and then he settled in at Stanford University, where he founded the creative writing program. His students included Sandra Day O'Connor, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, Ken Kesey, Gordon Lish, Ernest Gaines, and Larry McMurtry. He served as a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. He was elected to the Sierra Club board of directors for a term that lasted 1964—1966. He also moved into a house in nearby Los Altos Hills and became one of the town's most prominent residents. Stegner's novel Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972, and was directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote (later published as the memoir A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West). Stegner's use of uncredited passages taken directly from Foote's letters caused a minor controversy. Stegner also won the National Book Award for The Spectator Bird in 1977. In the late 1980s, he refused a National Medal from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1992 because he believed the NEA had become too politicized. He died in Santa Fe, New Mexico, while visiting the city to give a lecture. His death was the result of injuries suffered in an automobile accident on March 28, 1993. He is the father of nature writer Page Stegner. ( From Wikipedia )

Book Reviews   Angle of Repose is a disquisition on the high price paid for men of ability and women of taste for the opening and developing of the West. The financial rewards could be great, but the waste in spiritual resources, cultural disappointment and blasted hopes could be equally great.... Some of the chapters will surely put some readers in mind of the early Willa Cather.... They have the same tactile feel for the American West and they rehearse the struggles of those times. Thomas Lask - New York Times 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  

Discussion Questions   Background: The title is an engineering term for the angle at which soil finally settles after, for example, being dumped from a mine as tailings. It seems to describe the loose wandering of the Ward family as they try to carve a civilized existence in the west and, hopefully, return to the east as successes. The story is a series of Oliver's hopeful struggles on various mining, hydrology and construction engineering jobs, and Susan's adaptation and struggle to support him. The book is given more complexity by having Lyman Ward narrate from his wheelchair a century after the fact. It is clear we are reading Lyman's interpretation of the story, a literary device that encourages readers to be more skeptical of what they are told. Some of the disappointments of his life, including his divorce, color his interpretation of his grandparent's story. Toward the end of the novel, he gives up on his original ambition for a complete biography of his grandmother. It is as if he picked up the disappointment from his ancestors or, perhaps, is drawn to focus more closely on his own mortality and what he can accomplish himself. The novel is directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. Stegner's use of substantial passages of Foote's actual letters as correspondence from his fictional character Susan Burling Ward caused controversy when it came to light. His use of the letters, however, gives the novel's locations—Leadville, New Almaden, Idaho, and Mexico—an authentic feel one doesn't usually find in westerns; the letters also give the Ward's struggles with the environment, shady businessmen, politicians and other dangers a human feel. In Lyman's interaction with (and rantings about) 1970s culture, we get yet another historical dimension to the story (Lyman's son teaches at Berkeley, and a counter culture daughter of a neighbor helps transcribe the tapes). The novel is thickly populated with real, although minor, historical personages, giving further realism to the narrative. A "Who's Who" of American mining engineers of the late 1800s make their appearance, including Clarence King, Samuel Emmons, Henry Janin, and Rossiter Raymond ( From the publisher .)

________________________

1. What do you think of Stegner's narrative technique, i.e., his use of a contemporary historian to tell Susan Ward's story? Is Lyman Ward a reliable narrator? How would this novel be different if Lyman's own story were excluded?

2. Stegner's narrator is confined to a wheelchair and partially paralyzed. He cannot move his head to either side, and thus can only look straight ahead. How does Stegner use these limitations to shape Lyman's role as a narrator and biographer? What is Stegner saying about the past and future?

3. How much of Susan Ward's destiny was determined by the era in which she lived and the limitations that era placed on a woman's freedom? Do you think of her as a woman ahead of her time?

4. Throughout the novel, Susan is torn between her old life on the east coast and her new one on the west. To each of her western homes she strives to bring a sense of gentility and comfort, even in the most rudimentary of circumstances. Her cabin in Leadville, for instance, becomes a magnet for the town's cultural elite despite the cramped quarters. Are the efforts futile or worthwhile? Do you applaud her attempts at civilizing the West or is she merely unable to accept another way of life for what it is? Is there a fundamental difference between America's two coasts today?

5. Stegner eliminates any concrete evidence of Susan's infidelity with Frank Sargent, leaving Lyman the task of piecing together the events that led up to Agnes's death. Why are these details left deliberately obscure? Does this heighten or mitigate the effects of Agnes's death on the story? Is Lyman being fair to Susan in his depiction of these events?

6. Susan often wonders if she made the right decision in marrying Oliver. Would someone like Thomas Hudson have brought her more happiness? What do you imagine Susan's life would have been like if she had stayed in the East? How did her years in the West shape her character?

7. Why does the novel end with Susan's return to Idaho? Why is it significant that the details of her life in the house in Grass Valley are given to us through the present only?

8. Do you think Lyman identifies more with his grandmother or his grandfather? How do the various aspects of his present situation—i.e., age, physical disability, marriage, career—compare and contrast to those of his grandparents?

9. The geologic term "angle of repose," defines the angle of the slope at which debris will cease rolling downhill and settle in one place, as in a landslide. Why do you think Stegner chose this term for the title of his novel? By the end of the novel, has Lyman reached his own angle of repose? How does he change over the course of the summer in which this novel takes place?

10. Stegner's novels are known for their strong sense of place. What role does the terrain in the West play in Angle of Repose ? Would you consider the land to be a "character" in the novel? Can you describe this character in human terms?

11. The story of America's western expansion has been told in myriad ways, but often with the same details: danger and hardships, brave but crude pioneers, and get-rich-quick schemes peddled by untrustworthy scam artists. How do Susan and Oliver's experiences compare and contrast with these myths of the American West? How is each a hero in his or her own right? How are they different from the stereotypical western hero?

12. Angle of Repose was written in 1971, during a period of great upheaval in America's social and political culture. How does Stegner's novel reflect the issues that were prevalent at the time of his writing? What are the parallels, if any, between Susan Ward's story and that of Shelly Hawkes? How does each woman represent her own era? Is either story as relevant today? ( Questions issued by publisher .) top of page (summary)

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Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner

• Publication Date: May 1, 1992
• Paperback: 569 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics)
• ISBN-10: 014016930X
• ISBN-13: 9780140169300
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A classic, or a fraud?

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Plagiarism is apparently so rife these days that it would not be surprising to discover that “The Little Book of Plagiarism,” by Richard A. Posner, has itself been plagiarized.

What is this modern-day phenomenon that has spread like poison ivy through the ranks of novelists, historians, academics, scientists, students and almost anyone who uses and publishes words?

Plagiarism is a species of intellectual fraud that an author claims is original but has been copied from another source without permission or acknowledgment, thus deceiving and harming the reader.

I just committed plagiarism.

The first paragraph was lifted nearly verbatim, without quotes or attribution, from a review of three books on plagiarism by Charles McGrath in the New York Times. McGrath is the former editor of that newspaper’s Sunday Book Review. Surely he knows what he is writing about, which is why I used his words. Why use someone else’s words without attributing them? Well, because it makes me look smart and original if I pretend they’re my own.

The third paragraph is a slightly altered version of the definition of plagiarism in Posner’s book. It uses some of his original wording. I assume, because he is a federal judge and teaches at a distinguished law school, that Posner knows what he is talking about. Thus, I too look learned.

These are examples of the type of borrowing, plagiarism, literary theft or copyright infringement -- take your pick -- that occur in Wallace Stegner’s “Angle of Repose,” which received the Pulitzer Prize in 1972.

Of course, “Angle of Repose” was a work of fiction -- but that doesn’t mean it can’t have been plagiarized. As it happens, Stegner used the private letters of Mary Hallock Foote and additional portions of her unpublished memoir intact, edited or combined with invented material for the basic structure of his narrative. He included page-long passages and entire paragraphs unaltered, slightly changed or invented, and borrowed specific details of her life for his most memorable character, Susan Burling Ward.

In the process, Stegner brought Foote to the attention of a new generation of readers. Foote was a magazine writer, illustrator and author in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who wrote about the American West and lived in Colorado, Idaho and California. Stegner was responsible for a Foote boomlet by teaching her stories in his literature courses at Stanford University and including them in two anthologies of American writers before he inserted her semi-fictional character in his prize-winning novel.

Criticism of Stegner’s use of Foote’s material has circulated mainly among academics and some feminists and has gone largely unnoticed by the public, even though a magazine article in this newspaper drew attention to the issue five years ago. Whether Stegner was guilty of plagiarism and slander, as his harshest critics maintain, the complexity of the act has never been completely explored.

It’s important to remember that Stegner had permission to use the material and that he acknowledged its use, sort of. There were extenuating circumstances. As is often the case in life, it is the gray areas that predominate and are most interesting.

Just as I warped Posner’s words to fit my purposes, Stegner altered Foote’s life to fit his needs for a multidimensional novel of the American West. The book remains a classic not only as it relates to the West but as a study of East versus West, of marriage and of the relationship of the past to the present. Readers of the San Francisco Chronicle voted it the best novel about the West written by a Westerner in the last century, and it has sold nearly 600,000 copies.

The book evolved in the following manner. After hearing Stegner lecture in 1954, a graduate student asked if he thought that Foote would be a proper subject for his dissertation. She would, Stegner said. Her letters and manuscripts were obtained from a relative of Foote’s in Nevada City, Calif., and brought to the Stanford University library. The student failed to produce anything, and by mutual consent, Stegner took over the subject in 1967.

Foote had died in 1938, and her closest relatives were her grandchildren. Stegner dealt solely with one, Janet Micoleau, who he had met in Nevada City through mutual friends. When she thought it necessary, Micoleau contacted two sisters for concurrence in her dealings with Stegner.

Stegner assured Micoleau in 1967 that the book would contain no recognizable characters and “no quotations direct from the letters.” Was this all right with her? She replied that the family would “be delighted to have the MHF materials used as background.” Stegner thanked Micoleau for her “blanket approval.”

He wasn’t sure at first if the book would be a novel or a biography. He settled on a fictional account because “she just wasn’t a big enough figure for a biography to be a big book.”

Stegner’s concept of the book kept evolving. He then told Micoleau he wanted to mix fact with fiction. He was bending the characters “so you may not recognize your ancestors when I get through with them.”

At most, Stegner assured her, he was using only selected paragraphs from the letters and memoir. (Actually, the borrowed passages would be considerably longer.) Would she read a draft of the manuscript? “I’m having to throw in a domestic tragedy of an entirely fictional nature,” Stegner warned.

Micoleau declined. She was busy, and a 600-page manuscript was a lot to read. “I’m sure all concerned are content to trust your judgment,” she wrote Stegner. “We all wish you well with the undertaking and have no desire to censor or interfere with it in any way.”

What Stegner alluded to was a scene designed to give a fuller, more complex quality to the Susan Burling Ward character he was basing on Foote. In it, Ward and her husband’s younger assistant are attracted to each other. Something intimate (but vague) occurs between them on the bank of an Idaho irrigation ditch. Ward’s young daughter (who has the same first name as Foote’s real daughter) wanders off and drowns.

There was no such known liaison in Foote’s life, and Agnes, her daughter, actually died later in California of natural causes. The Foote family and others would come to see this fictional scene as an unwarranted stain on her character.

A paragraph in the front of the book thanks “J.M.” and the one sister Stegner was aware of for the “loan” of their ancestors. “Though I have used many details of their lives and characters, I have not hesitated to warp both personalities and events to fictional needs. This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. It is in no sense a family history.”

Although Stegner knew that publication of Foote’s memoir was imminent, he was trying to preserve -- as he had promised he would -- the family’s anonymity. In the end, the novel was praised for its verisimilitude.

The offense of plagiarism, dating back to the Bible, or, for a more secular example, to Aristophanes, has never lent itself to absolute definition and consensus. (The preceding words were stolen from “Stolen Words” by Thomas Mallon, New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1989, pp. 2-4. The source has been credited as it should be in a work of nonfiction.)

So what is my conclusion after weighing all the available evidence? The legal counterpart of plagiarism is copyright infringement. It would take a long and costly legal suit to make a determination on this issue, and no one has chosen to go that route. The legal equivalent of slander is libel -- and you can’t libel a dead person. So there doesn’t seem to be much of a legal case.

But there is a deeper level on which to judge Stegner’s actions, although I hesitate to use the word “moral” or its opposite. To me the ultimate question is whether he hurt or fooled not just someone but a discernible group of people.

I have talked with three of Foote’s great-grandchildren. Two understood why Stegner, in his words, had to “warp” their ancestor’s life to fit the needs of fiction. One was adamant in her condemnation of the author.

And then there are the readers who may feel they were fooled or cheated out of a real work of fiction. It’s hard to know how they felt; most were probably unaware of the issue at least until it surfaced in a new introduction written by Jackson J. Benson, a previous Stegner biographer, for a 2000 edition of the paperback.

It seems to me that Stegner and the Foote family both made mistakes -- but that doesn’t ruin the book. It still remains a classic in my estimation.

This story, as the best history should, ends on the completion of a cycle. Benson submitted his introduction in manuscript form to Stegner’s widow, Mary, before the paperback came out. She asked that certain parts be deleted; Benson partly complied. And Mary Stegner, who is now in a rest home at the age of 96, has inserted a provision in her will that no movie will be made from that novel.

So there is sensitivity within both the Foote and the Stegner families on the issue of plagiarism. In my mind, the question defies a clear yes-or-no stance. Again, it is the gray areas in history that are the most intriguing.

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Angle of Repose

47 pages • 1 hour read

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Written by Wallace Stegner and released in 1971, Angle of Repose is a novel about Lyman Ward , a wheelchair-bound historian who decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents, particularly his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward . He hopes that their experiences will help him deal with his present situation. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972 and is based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, which were later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West .

A bone disease forces Lyman to live confined to a wheelchair after having his leg amputated. While Lyman was in the hospital convalescing, his wife, Ellen Hammond Ward, left him for Lyman's surgeon. To pass the time, Lyman moves into his old family home and begins to study his family’s history, charting his grandmother Susan's emergence on the New York high society scene before she meets and marries Oliver Ward , a mining engineer. Lyman originally plans to write a novel about Susan's professional experiences but writes about her marriage instead. Lyman accepts the help of a young college dropout, Shelly Rasmussen , in sorting through Susan's papers, which detail Susan's experiences as a writer and an artist in the mid- to late-19th century.

Susan and Oliver were married for 60 years and faced tragedy , infidelity, jealousy, and even long separations. Susan’s story is told in an epistolary style , through letters written to her closest friend, Augusta Hudson: After a long journey to California in the late 1800s, Susan arrives in her new home: a cottage on the outskirts of a lively mining town. Susan’s reputation as an artist proceeds her, but she does not fall in love with the locals. Oliver spends his days in the mine, and Susan is lonely. After she becomes pregnant, she is happier and makes friends. Susan publishes her experiences in a magazine article and is paid. She gives birth to her son, Ollie. Soon, Susan learns that all is not well in the mine. Oliver falls out with his boss and quits. They are forced to leave their home and find somewhere new.

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While Oliver searches for work, they rely on Susan’s art and writing to keep the family afloat. They separate and reunite, but Susan soon begins an affair with Oliver's assistant, Frank. As marital and financial struggles continue to plaque Susan and Oliver, they relocate to Colorado, Mexico, Idaho, and California. Susan gives birth to a daughter named Agnes. As Susan and Oliver’s marriage continues to deteriorate, Oliver drinks more, and Susan becomes increasingly resentful. To make ends meet, Oliver takes up a new job, but it means the family must leave their home again. Susan goes to Canada. Before she leaves, however, she sees Frank one last time. Frank admits that he still loves Susan, and they kiss. In the summer, Agnes drowns in the canal. A few days later, Frank shoots himself in the head. Oliver and Susan separate for two years. Eventually, Oliver takes a job at the Zodiac mine, and he and Susan live nearby until they die.

Through learning of Susan and Oliver's hurdles, Lyman makes discoveries about himself and his own life; he realizes that a lifelong commitment to another person is difficult no matter what time period one lives in, or no matter how old one is. Through learning of his grandparents’ mistakes, his bitterness ebbs away. Though the book does not end on a saccharine note, Lyman does want to learn to forgive his Ellen, not for her sake, but to lift the burden from his own shoulders and become a better person.

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