Will I love Angle of Repose?

I first read this book in 1995, almost twenty-five years after its publication date of 1971, making it a generation later. Re-reading it in 2025 made it another generation, a long enough survival for a work of literature to become a classic. And there are elements of reading a classic, such as grammatical constructions that have gone out of fashion and words contemporary authors would choose not to use. It is also longer, slower and more erudite than much contemporary historical fiction, which is not in itself a bad thing.

A life in the wild entails sacrifice in addition to romance.

Few readers would think of Wallace Stegner’s 1971 Pulitzer Prize winner as a book about the mountains. Its narrator is an elderly man confined to a wheelchair who spends his days researching a biography. Yet his fascinating subject is his frontier-era grandmother, Susan Burling Ward, who gave up a life among sophisticates on the East Coast to follow her husband, a geological engineer, into the mountains of the West. There she found beauty and adventure, but also isolation from the culture and society she had left behind. Are the… show more.

Susan Ward joins her husband, a mining engineer, at a mercury mine near San Jose, California, coming west from New York.

She is an illustrator and writer and, as her grandson tells it, never completely adjusts to life in the West. We get much description of California, however, in the layered times in which her story is told. She and her husband settle in Grass Valley, where her husband works for quartz and gold mines.

Wallace Stegner’s use of Mary Hallock Foote’s memoir and diaries as the basis for this story is still controversial. Foote lived from 1847 to 1938… show more.

I was in my mid-twenties when I fell under the sway of the old-school master of western writing, Wallace Stegner. His Angle of Repose is a triumph, mixing elements of failed love and mine engineering to tell a tale in which the raw material of the West is carved into its modern shape. The story captures the struggles of marriage and tribulations of making a home out on the frontier of American civilization. Concrete is invented, no less.

An “angle of repose” is the steepest angle at which loose material, such as sand, can be piled without slumping. Stegner chose an explicit term of geology and soils science as the metaphor for this love story. His protagonists, a restless miner and his Yankee wife, dwell in the mountains of California, Colorado, and Mexico as they build, betray, and somehow sustain their marriage. Stegner evokes the voracious appetite of the mining companies, the destruction caused by mining operations, the challenges of living on mountain edges, and the sharp beauty of western North America, all central themes of environmental history.

Stegner was one of several writers who influenced Edward Abbey, and therefore Doug Peacock. Published in 1971, Angle of Repose was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1972. The writing is efficient and as beautiful as the region it describes. Stegner’s love of the people and landscape in western North America rings true in this book. Stegner’s impact on Abbey and Peacock is as clear as his writing.