Social Class in the Writings

A popular writer of the early 1900s, Foote would gain fame much later, in 1979, when Mary Ellen Williams-Walsh exposed Wallace Stegner’s liberal appropriation of Foote’s letters in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1971 novel Angle of Repose. Those letters are discussed in this book. Focused on Foote’s literary career and her life, the book includes the writer’s adventures in 1879-90 in the silver camp of Leadville, Colorado, where she based three of her novels on Western social class.