What is "angle of repose"

Repose \Re*pose"\, n. [F. repos. See Repose, v.]

1. A lying at rest; sleep; rest; quiet.

   Shake off the golden slumber of repose.
   --Shak.

2. Rest of mind; tranquillity; freedom from uneasiness; also, a composed manner or deportment.

3. (Poetic) A rest; a pause.

4. (Fine Arts) That harmony or moderation which affords rest for the eye; -- opposed to the scattering and division of a subject into too many unconnected parts, and also to anything which is overstrained; as, a painting may want repose.

   Angle of repose (Physics), the inclination of a plane at which a body placed on the plane would remain at rest, or if in motion would roll or slide down with uniform velocity; the angle at which the various kinds of earth will stand when abandoned to themselves.

   Syn: Rest; recumbency; reclination; ease; quiet; quietness; tranquillity; peace.

Angle of Repose is a 1971 novel by Wallace Stegner about a wheelchair-using historian, Lyman Ward, who has lost connection with his son and living family and decides to write about his frontier-era grandparents. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1972. The novel is directly based on the letters of Mary Hallock Foote, later published as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West.

Stegner's use of substantial passages from Foote's actual letters as the correspondence of his fictional character Susan Burling Ward was and remains controversial among some scholars. The controversy is somewhat tempered since Stegner had received permission to use Foote's writings, implying as much in the book's acknowledgments page.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Angle of Repose #82 on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.