If there’s a novel that today’s microaggressed students should read, it’s Wallace Stegner’s Pulitz-er Prize-winning Angle of Repose. Published in 1971, it focuses on the life of Susan Ward (modeled on the 19th-century writer and illustrator Mary Hallock Foote), who leaves her home in the Hudson River valley to make a life with her mining-engineer husband in the West. It’s a story of how the American West was settled, how communities and individuals fought against isolation to create a new identity and place. But it’s also a book about history—about how the past shapes us and, importantly, how it provides us with a proper perspective of our own lives. For Stegner, without any sense of the past we are unable to be either wise or just, because without it, we have no sense of what real injustice looks like. The narrator, Lyman Ward (based on the New Humanist Norman Foerster), is a retired professor and amputee who has moved into his deceased grandparents’ home in Grand Valley, California, to study and write about their life. Ward retraces their meeting in New York and their early years at various mining camps across the West, and how their union of opposites—East and West, a romantic and a realist, woman and man—survived despite professional failures, miscommunication, and moral failings, and whether anything more than mere survival in marriage is possible.

Source: Westward, Oh | The Weekly Standard