Angle of Repose Read Online Free PDF

defeated by the system or by our own self-delusions, but we can only live and try to go forward if we believe. Our going forward, of course, often means going west, looking for the main chance, as Stegner’s own father did, or as Bo Mason, the character in The Big Rock Candy Mountain modeled after George Stegner, did, or as Oliver and Susan Ward did. East versus West, civilization versus opportunity is a theme at the heart of the American experience. And as our boats beat ceaselessly into the past to find our future, we continue to ask, What have we inherited?

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
    WORKS BY WALLACE STEGNER
     
    All the Little Live Things. New York: Viking, 1967.
    Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1954.
    The Big Rock Candy Mountain. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1943.
    Collected Stories of Wallace Stegner. New York: Random House, 1990.
    Crossing to Safety. New York: Random House, 1987.
    Marking the Sparrow’s Fall: Wallace Stegner’s American West. Edited by Page Stegner. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.
    Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West. New York: Random House, 1992.
    Wolf Willow: A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier. New York: Viking, 1962.
     
    BIOGRAPHY AND INTERVIEWS
     
    Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: Viking, 1996.
    Etulain, Richard W., ed. Conversations with Wallace Stegner on Western History and Literature. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1983.
     
     
    BIBLIOGRAPHY
     
    Colberg, Nancy. Wallace Stegner: A Descriptive Bibliography. Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1990.
     
    CRITICAL BOOKS AND ESSAY COLLECTIONS ON THE LIFE AND WORKS OF WALLACE STEGNER
     
    Arthur, Anthony ed. Critical Essays on Wallace Stegner. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
    Meine, Curt, ed. Wallace Stegner and the Continental Vision: Essays on Literature, History, and Landscape. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1997.
    Rankin, Charles E., ed. Wallace Stegner: Man and Writer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996.
    Robinson, Forrest G., and Margaret G. Robinson. Wallace Stegner. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977.

I
    GRASS VALLEY

1
    Now I believe they will leave me alone. Obviously Rodman came up hoping to find evidence of my incompetence—though how an incompetent could have got this place renovated, moved his library up, and got himself transported to it without arousing the suspicion of his watchful children, ought to be a hard one for Rodman to answer. I take some pride in the way I managed all that. And he went away this afternoon without a scrap of what he would call data.
    So tonight I can sit here with the tape recorder whirring no more noisily than electrified time, and say into the microphone the place and date of a sort of beginning and a sort of return: Zodiac Cottage, Grass Valley, California, April 12, 1970.
    Right there, I might say to Rodman, who doesn’t believe in time, notice something: I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were—inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial.
    Even places, especially this house whose air is thick with the past. My antecedents support me here as the old wistaria at the corner supports the house. Looking at its cables wrapped two or three times around the cottage, you would swear, and you could be right, that if they were cut the place would fall