The protagonists represent the opposing but equally strong qualities required to build a new country. Author of many novels and short stories, Stegner was one of America’s preeminent authors yet, as I discovered when I tried to buy one of his books, he is scarcely known in the UK.Īngle of Repose, winner of the 1972 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and therefore the best known, is at one level a fat epic novel about the struggle to build America and the myriad forces that went into creating the American dream. Born in Iowa on his grandfather’s farm, he spent his boyhood in Saskatchewan, Canada, and his youth in Salt Lake City. Wallace Earle Stegner (1909-93) was the founder and for twenty five years director of Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program. I am eternally grateful to him and still have the scrap of paper – menu on one side, ‘Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose’, on the other – which I stuffed into my tiny bag. My businessman, more interested in fiction than foreign exchange, tells me, the book junkie, of a wonderful American author of whom I am ignorant. Either he won’t read, ‘except on planes when I buy whatever I can find at the airport’, or his answer will be as revealing as if I had asked him to tell me his life story. At a loss, I ask what sort of books he enjoys. The conversation dries up after the soup. I am next to a businessman at a formal dinner.
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