An American masterpiece and iconic novel of the West by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner—a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past. Angle of Repose is a 1971 novel by Wallace Stegner that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. The book is about Lyman Ward, a retired and ill historian who uses a wheelchair and decides to write about his grandparents who lived during the frontier era. The book is a story of discovery, both personal and historical. The book is based on the lives of the Footes, and Stegner used many of Mary Hallock Foote's letters and reminiscences.