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''Angle of Repose'' is a 1971 novel by Wallace Stegner about a wheelchair-using historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. The novel is directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, later published as ''A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West''. Stegner's use of substantial passages from Foote's actual letters as the correspondence of his fictional character Susan Burling Ward was and remains controversial among some scholars.〔Fradkin (2008), 8〕〔Reynolds (2007)〕 The controversy is somewhat tempered since Stegner had received permission to use Foote's writings, implying as much in the book's acknowledgments page.〔Reynolds (2003)〕 In 1998, the Modern Library ranked ''Angle of Repose'' #82 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. ==Explanation of the novel's title== The title is an engineering term for the angle at which soil finally settles after, for example, being dumped from a mine as tailings. It seems to describe the loose wandering of the Ward family as they try to carve out a civilized existence in the West and, Susan hopes, to return to the East as successes. The story details Oliver's struggles on various mining, hydrology and construction engineering jobs, and Susan's adaptation to a hard life. Another view has to do with a typical construction of canals and the drowning of Ward's daughter in a canal. Canal banks are sometimes simply piled mounds of dirt. Slanted walls of dirt are left at the angle of repose after the canal is built. Small disturbances to the dirt can cause it to slide down. Ward's daughter fell into a canal and couldn't climb out because of this. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Angle of Repose」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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