Oliver falls out with his boss and quits. Soon, Susan learns that all is not well in the mine. Susan publishes her experiences in a magazine article and is paid. After she becomes pregnant, she is happier and makes friends.

Oliver spends his days in the mine, and Susan is lonely. Susan’s reputation as an artist proceeds her, but she does not fall in love with the locals. Susan’s story is told in an epistolary style, through letters written to her closest friend, Augusta Hudson: After a long journey to California in the late 1800s, Susan arrives in her new home: a cottage on the outskirts of a lively mining town. Susan and Oliver were married for 60 years and faced tragedy, infidelity, jealousy, and even long separations. Lyman accepts the help of a young college dropout, Shelly Rasmussen, in sorting through Susan's papers, which detail Susan's experiences as a writer and an artist in the mid- to late-19th century. Lyman originally plans to write a novel about Susan's professional experiences but writes about her marriage instead. To pass the time, Lyman moves into his old family home and begins to study his family’s history, charting his grandmother Susan's emergence on the New York high society scene before she meets and marries Oliver Ward, a mining engineer. While Lyman was in the hospital convalescing, his wife, Ellen Hammond Ward, left him for Lyman's surgeon. I'm re-reading currently.A bone disease forces Lyman to live confined to a wheelchair after having his leg amputated. Filled with awesome views of the western united states through stegner's beautiful writing. This book shows 4 generations of a western family and how Eastern culture shaped them and how they eventually became westerners. His grandfather, however, was a self-taught engineer, mapping miles and miles of mines in California, Idaho and elsewhere. His grandparents had started out Easterners with at least his grandmother assuming that they would eventually move back there to be part of the literary circle she had grown to love and be a part of.

He has moved back into his grandparents' farm house and is going through the reams of letters, artwork, and journals of his grandparents (his grandfather was an engineer in the New West and his grandmother a celebrated artist from the Hudson School). The narrator is a survivor of bone disease and is confined to a wheelchair. This is the novel he won the Pulitzer Prize for. I didn't listen to the audio recording of this, but they didn't have a picture of the book otherwise.

Angle of repose by wallace stegner