[The first Pulitzer Prizes
were given out 100 years ago, on June 5, 1917.
So to celebrate that centennial, this week I’ll be AmericanStudying five
Pulitzer-winning works of fiction, leading up to a special weekend post on the
most recent winner!]
On two literary contexts
for Wallace Stegner’s 1971 masterpiece.
In the course of
a more than 50-year career, Wallace
Stegner (1909-1993) published 13 novels, 17 full-length works of
non-fiction, and a handful of story collections. He won the 1977
National Book Award for his moving novel of marriage, travel, and aging The
Spectator Bird (1976). But I would certainly call the Pulitzer-winning Angle
of Repose (1971) his best and most important novel, not only for its
unquestionable quality but also because it exemplifies very fully his most
abiding concerns and themes across the length of that career: memory and
family, embodied in Angle by his late
20th century narrator Lyman Ward, a divorced, isolated, wheelchair-bound
historian researching his grandparents Susan Burling Ward and Oliver Ward’s
late 19th century lives; and the American West, as those lives
(based on the historical figures Mary
Hallock Foote and Arthur De
Wint Foote) took his grandparents throughout the Western United States. Stegner
was frequently referred to as “The Dean of Western Writers,”
but I would revise the phrase to something like “Western Storytellers,” as it
seems to me that he was most especially concerned with, and spent his career both
examining and modeling, how we remember and tell stories of the West.
Angle of Repose is well worth reading and
enjoying on its own terms, but I want to use the rest of this post to highlight
two additional literary contexts for Stegner’s novel. For one thing, Mary
Hallock Foote herself was a very interesting and talented writer; Stegner
uses (and even quotes extensively from, with permission) her
voluminous body of letters in his novel, but she also published a number of
short stories and novels, most about the Western settings and worlds into which
her marriage to the mining engineer Arthur took her (she was born and raised in
New York City). I haven’t read nearly all of those works, but would say that
Foote’s 1886 short story
“The Fate of a Voice” (published in Century
Magazine) nicely encapsulates both her talents and her ambiguous perspective
on those Western worlds and experiences. Foote’s heroine, Madeline Hendrie, is
a talented opera singer torn between a future in New York and one with Western
engineer Aldis; in the course of the story she loses her voice (after an
accident of Aldis’), regains it and performs in New York, and then chooses to
leave that world behind and spend her life in the West with Aldis. The story
concludes with other voices, some lamenting Madeline’s choice and others
celebrating it; although overall I believe Foote’s narrator sides with the
latter, she certainly airs both perspectives, and both help us understand her
own complex artistic and Western life and identity (as well as those of Stegner’s
characters).
In its own era,
Stegner’s book is also part of a group of 1970s novels that focus on historian
narrators researching their own family histories and legacies. I’ve written
before in this space about two of my favorite such novels: David
Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident
(1981), in which historian John Bradley researches his father and his family’s
histories of slavery and rebellion; and E.L.
Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel (1971), in which historian Daniel
Isaacson researches his parents Paul and Rochelle (fictionalized versions of
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg) and their trial and execution for espionage. Also
interestingly in this mix (SPOILER alert) is Gore
Vidal’s Burr (1973), as Vidal’s fictional narrator Charlie Schuyler eventually
learns that the subject of his historical researches, Aaron Burr, is also his
father. Each of these books is distinct and worth its own examination and
analysis, but all use the meta-fictional perspectives and structures comprised
by their historical narrators to frame and comment upon the stories and
histories they’re telling and re-telling. And Wallace Stegner’s novel more than
stands alongside these other masterpieces of the genre.
Next Pulitzer
winner tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Thoughts on other prize-winning (or –worthy) books?
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