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Angle of Repose is the Pulitzer-prize winning fictional work by Wallace Stegner awarded in 1972 that has become a contemporary classic. It was considered by Stegner to be the masterpiece of his literary career and substantial body of work. The narrator is Lyman Ward, a retired history professor afflicted with a chronic debilitating condition that has left him in a wheelchair subsequent to the amputation of one leg. His wife has left him and he is resisting his son's suggestion to put him in an assisted-living facility. It is at this point, that Lyman Ward decides to go to the home of his grandparents and research their interesting history, as they were pioneers in the burgeoning west, and perhaps find himself in the process. His grandfather Oliver was an engineer specializing in mining, canal and water projects, while his grandmother Susan was writer and artist, often having to support the family. With his grandfather's engineering projects, the family lived in remote areas in California, Colorado, Idaho, South Dakota and Mexico. It is a multi-generational saga with very complex and interesting characters giving much insight into families and relationships weaving together all of these stories. It should be noted that the fictional Susan Burling Ward is based on the life and writings of Mary Hallock Foote, a nineteenth-century writer and illustrator. This timeless classic is not to be missed.

"Remember the one who wanted to know where you'd learned so casually a technical term like 'angle of repose'? . . . But you were too alert to the figurative possibilities of words not to see the phrase as descriptive of human as well as detrital rest. As you said, it was too good for mere dirt; you tried to apply it to your own wandering and uneasy life. It is the angle I am aiming for myself, and I don't mean the rigid angle at which I rest in this chair. I wonder if you ever reached it."

"What really interests me is how two such unlike particles clung together, and under what strains, rolling downhill into their future until they reached the angle of repose where I knew them. That's where the interest is. That's where the meaning will be if I find any."