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From: "A. S. Balch" <>
Subject: [ROOTS-L] Foote
Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2005 09:21:53 -0500
References: <200508211228.j7LCSFvU024407@lists5.rootsweb.com>

I found the following at: http://www.ochcom.org/foote

Adrian

Foote's legacy has been most closely intertwined with Wallace Stegner
(1909-1993), whose Pulitzer Prize winning novel
**Angle of Repose (1971)**
is based on Foote's personal history. As a novelist, Stegner is especially
credited with providing a refreshingly realistic portrayal of the men who
first pioneered the American West. In Angle of Repose, his most acclaimed
work of fiction, Stegner focused on the feminine experience of that era by
exploiting Foote's literary effects.
Miller's biography tells the entire story of Foote's life, rather than
concentrating on the difficult years in Idaho as Stegner did. The same year
that Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize, Foote's autobiography, A
Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West was published by the Huntington
Library at the urging of Foote's descendents who objected to the great
liberties that Stegner took in telling her story. Straddling fact and
fiction, Angle of Repose was also met with charges of plagiarism in academic
circles. Stegner self-consciously wrote to the Foote family when he
forwarded a copy of Angle:

"I must admit I send you 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." Instead, Stegner became fascinated by the
Foote's marriage and the stresses it underwent in Idaho. For his own
reasons, Stegner told a story of Victorian infidelity in the American desert
high plains drawn from tidbits suggested by letters between Foote and Helena
de Kay, Foote's lifelong literary confidant.

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• [ROOTS-L] Foote by "A. S. Balch" <>