When she thought it necessary, Micoleau contacted two sisters for concurrence in her dealings with Stegner. Stegner dealt solely with one, Janet Micoleau, who he had met in Nevada City through mutual friends. The student failed to produce anything, and by mutual consent, Stegner took over the subject in 1967.įoote had died in 1938, and her closest relatives were her grandchildren. Her letters and manuscripts were obtained from a relative of Foote’s in Nevada City, Calif., and brought to the Stanford University library. After hearing Stegner lecture in 1954, a graduate student asked if he thought that Foote would be a proper subject for his dissertation. The book evolved in the following manner. Readers of the San Francisco Chronicle voted it the best novel about the West written by a Westerner in the last century, and it has sold nearly 600,000 copies. The book remains a classic not only as it relates to the West but as a study of East versus West, of marriage and of the relationship of the past to the present. Just as I warped Posner’s words to fit my purposes, Stegner altered Foote’s life to fit his needs for a multidimensional novel of the American West. As is often the case in life, it is the gray areas that predominate and are most interesting. It’s important to remember that Stegner had permission to use the material and that he acknowledged its use, sort of. Whether Stegner was guilty of plagiarism and slander, as his harshest critics maintain, the complexity of the act has never been completely explored. Stegner was responsible for a Foote boomlet by teaching her stories in his literature courses at Stanford University and including them in two anthologies of American writers before he inserted her semi-fictional character in his prize-winning novel.Ĭriticism of Stegner’s use of Foote’s material has circulated mainly among academics and some feminists and has gone largely unnoticed by the public, even though a magazine article in this newspaper drew attention to the issue five years ago. Foote was a magazine writer, illustrator and author in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who wrote about the American West and lived in Colorado, Idaho and California. In the process, Stegner brought Foote to the attention of a new generation of readers. He included page-long passages and entire paragraphs unaltered, slightly changed or invented, and borrowed specific details of her life for his most memorable character, Susan Burling Ward. As it happens, Stegner used the private letters of Mary Hallock Foote and additional portions of her unpublished memoir intact, edited or combined with invented material for the basic structure of his narrative. Of course, “Angle of Repose” was a work of fiction - but that doesn’t mean it can’t have been plagiarized.
0 kommentar(er)
