In a career spanning more than fifty years, Wallace Stegner (1909–93) emerged as the greatest contemporary author of the American West—writing more than two dozen works of history, biography, essays, and fiction, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Angle of Repose.
Stegner was "critical of the individualistic ethos of the West in all its manifestations: romantic, entrepreneurial and countercultural". He was passionate about the need to protect our wild places, and our landscape. A.O.Scott wrote: "Stegner’s books abide in an undervisited stretch of the American canon, like a national park you might drive past on the way to a theme park or ski resort. If you do visit, you find a topography that looks familiar at first glance — as if from an old postcard — but becomes stranger and more deeply shadowed the longer you stay."
We will read Angle of Repose and Crossing to Safety.
Week 1: Angle of Repose: "Grass Valley," Part I
Week 2: Angle of Repose: "New Almaden," Part II
Week 3: Angle of Repose: "Santa Cruz," Part III; "Leadville" Part IV, Chapter 1-2
Week 4: Angle of Repose: "Leadville" Part IV, chapter 3-10
Week 5: Angle of Repose: "Michoacán," Part V, and "On the Bough," Part VI
Week 6: Angle of Repose: "The Canyon," Part VII.
Week 7: Angle of Repose: "The Mesa," Part VIII, chapters 1-5
Week 8: Angle of Repose: "The Mesa," Part VIII, chapters 6-7; "The Zodiac Cottage," Part IX
Week 9: Crossing to Safety: Part I, chapters 1- 6
Week 10: Crossing to Safety: Part I, chapters 7- 13
Week 11: Crossing to Safety: Part II
Week 12: Crossing to Safety; Part III
Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose, Doubleday & Company, 1971, and First Vintage Books Edition, November 2014
Wallace Stegner, Crossing to Safety, Random House, 1987, Modern Library Paperback Edition, 2002