vividness to the Wards' struggles with the environment, shady businessmen, and politicians. Lyman's position in the contemporary culture of the late sixties provides another historical dimension to the story. Foils for this plot line include Lyman's adult son, a Berkeley-trained sociologist who sees little value in history, and a neighbor's daughter who helps transcribe Lyman's tape-recorded notes while she is home on summer break from UC Berkeley, where she has been active in the "hippie" counterculture movement. Fictional characters in Angle of Repose Lyman Ward 58-year-old retired history professor Lyman Ward is the narrator of the book. He is a divorced amputee with a debilitating disease that is slowly "petrifying" him. The text of Angle of Repose is transcribed tapes of Ward dictating what is to become the biography of his grandmother, Susan Burling Ward. The dictation begins on April 12, 1970, and continues through the summer. Fiercely independent, Ward lives alone at the Zodiac Cottage, the house where his grandmother spent the last decades of her life and in which he spent time as a child. "Because of his disease and because his wife has abandoned him, [Ward] has reached a major crisis point in his life...His crisis leads him to the need to find a direction for his shattered life. That direction is provided by finding out about and trying to understand his grandparents..." Aside from his scholarly work which consists of composing a biography from his grandmother's letters, published writings, and newspaper clippings, Ward spends his time on daily exercise, conversing with his summer secretary (Ada's daughter Shelly Rasmussen), and watching baseball with the Hawkes family. In addition, a major theme for Lyman Ward is fighting off intrusions into his life by his son, Rodman, and Rodman's wife who are skeptical of his self-reliance and, according to Ward, wish to send him to "...the retirement home in Menlo Park". According to Jackson J. Benson, the character of Lyman Ward was modeled after Stegner's dissertation adviser at the University of Iowa, Norman Foerster, who also lost the use of his legs late in life due to disease. Susan Burling Ward In her youth, Susan Burling (the character based on Mary Hallock Foote) was a promising writer and artist connected with some of the leading lights in New York culture. When she and Oliver Ward met and fell in love, she left the promise of New York to follow