Wallace Stegner is best remembered as a novelist, biographer, and historian, especially credited with providing a realistic portrayal of the men who first pioneered the American West.  In his most acclaimed novel, Angle of Repose (1971), Stegner focused on the feminine experience of that era by exploiting the literary effects of forgotten Western writer, Mary Hallock Foote (1847-1938).

Straddling fact and fiction, Angle of Repose met with the displeasure of Foote’s descendants for straying too far from reality, while Stegner was charged with plagiarism in academic circles. Decades earlier, Stegner’s approach to the novel began with the fictionalization of his wife’s family history in Remembering Laughter (1937) and then Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), in which he used his own parents as models for the main characters.  Stegner employed a similar technique for Angle of Repose and was motivated by a familiar theme which he admitted:  “...was like Big Rock Candy Mountain...the boomer husband and nesting wife, although with variations and on a much higher social level.”  

Angle’s acknowledgement maintains: “This is a novel which utilizes selected facts from real lives. It is in no sense a family history.” Stegner self-consciously wrote to the Foote family when he forwarded a copy of the novel: “I must admit I send you both this book with some trepidation...you may have expected me to stick with your grandmother’s real life and character. And that I found I was unable to do. I had to warp it—it warped itself...Perhaps Rod Paul can explain the whole operation when he publishes the Reminiscences.  Wonderful, I feel like a character in a literary history.” 

While not reviewed in the New York Times or Los Angeles Times, Angle of Repose brought Stegner a Pulitzer Prize in 1972.  That same year Foote’s autobiography, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West was published with a biographical note by Mr. Paul which cautioned Stegner’s fans: “Comparison of the novel with reminiscences and letters yields some fascinating insights into the freedom a writer feels when he is functioning as a novelist rather than as historian or biographer...The result is a book that has high value as a novel but should not be regarded as a factual explanation of Mary Hallock Foote and her career...Although basic settings and the cast of characters have been re-created out of Mary Hallock Foote’s own descriptions, with few changes...nevertheless the personalities and individual destinies have been developed through a blending of fact, perceptive interpretation, and sheer invention - at times, unrestrained invention.”  Since that time scholars have thoroughly documented the extent of Stegner’s literary theft while little energy has been spent in promoting the novels of Mary Hallock Foote. 

Born into a Quaker family on a “worn-out” farm along the Hudson River, Mary Hallock attended Poughkeepsie Female Collegiate Seminary and studied art at the Cooper Institute’s School of Design for Women in New York City. It was there that she first met Helena de Kay, who became her lifelong confidante.  Helena was the descendant of New York aristocrats, educated in Europe and, in 1875, married Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of Century Magazine. The following year, at the age of 29, Mary Hallock married a civil engineer, the son of a prominent Connecticut family, Arthur De Wint Foote. By the time of her marriage, Mary Hallock was already an accomplished artist and had illustrated editions of Longfellow and Hawthorne.  Her life changed when Arthur elected to practice his profession in the American West.  She followed him across the breadth of North America  as he pursued a series of jobs as mine manager and surveyor—from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to Mexico’s Michoacan province, from California’s Sierra Nevada to the Black Hills of the Dakotas. That haphazard course of employment directly influenced Mary’s artistic development. Impressed with descriptive letters from the West, Helena encouraged Mary to compose fictions set in those exotic locales and then convinced Richard to print them in Century, with illustrations by the author.        

Unfortunately, Arthur was only marginally successful as an engineer due to his unimpeachable honesty in a business filled with speculators and rascals. Mary observed that there were a great many people that her husband “couldn’t work for.” The dangers and difficulties of the mining industry provided the background for her first novel, The Led-Horse Claim, a melancholy romance set in the boom town of Leadville, Colorado. It was serialized in 1882 in Century and printed as a book the following year.    

Around that same time, Arthur changed the focus of his engineering and announced plans for a massive irrigation project in the desert high plains of southern Idaho which Mary first described as “Darkest Idaho! Thousands of acres of desert empty of history.” But she was soon won over by Arthur’s enthusiasm and wrote:
   
“We came out on the last long bench above the valley of the Boise and saw, across a bridge in the distance...the wild river we had come to tame, slipping from the hold of the farms along its banks that snatched a season’s crops from it as it fled.  Multiply that inconstant water a hundredfold, store it in the reservoirs the Man talked of building up in the crotches of the hills, cover the valley with farms, and even to the mind of the misbeliever, here was work worth spending a lifetime for...”