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 In 1971, when Stegner’s novel was published, Foote’s memoir was unpublished.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