He was a mining engineer and they moved West to lead an adventurous life, in canyons and on mountainsides, in shacks and cabins, on the edge of the frontier. She studied art in New York, at the Cooper Institute School of Design for Women, then married Arthur De Wint Foote. Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938) grew up in a Quaker farming family near Poughkeepsie.

Some people who knew about Foote assumed that’s what happened in her own life, when it did not. Instead of hewing to the historical facts, Stegner fabricates an adulterous liaison for the character based on Foote, a transgression that costs the life of a child and destroys her marriage.

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 In 1971, when Stegner’s novel was published, Foote’s memoir was unpublished.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. For 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.

Wallace stegner's angle of repose