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. It is in no sense a family history.” But it was recognizably a family history-one that distorted the lives it described. In a preface, Stegner wrote, “This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from their real lives. 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 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. 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.īut charges began emerging in the late seventies. In 1971, when Stegner’s novel was published, Foote’s memoir was unpublished. 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. Urn:oclc:805842283 Republisher_date 20120716063741 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120714185728 Scanner 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. OL478213W Page-progression lr Page_number_confidence 97.09 Pages 518 Ppi 600 Related-external-id urn:isbn:0679603387 Internetarchivebookdrive External-identifier Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 15:20:15 Boxid IA103002 Boxid_2 CH112301 Camera Canon EOS 5D Mark II City New York Donor

Angle of repose by wallace stegner