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Posted on May 12, 2022 at 12:26 PM by Sadye Scott-Hainchek
This past week, news came out about a novelist caught in a second plagiarism scandal.
Of course, what she did isn't new — she just got caught a lot faster than some of the previous ones.
Take, for example, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose.
Writer Sands Hall first gave the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel some critical thought in 1998, when she was involved in a potential theater adaptation of it.
Someone brought up that there was a bit of local controversy about Stegner's use of real-life characters in the town upon which he based his fictional setting.
Hall at first objected vociferously to this allegation — her father was, in fact, friends with Stegner.
But she deemed it worth at least looking into, so as not to prod at open wounds with the play's production.
The results of her investigation became an in-depth piece for Alta magazine, in which she concludes that while Stegner didn't violate any laws, he certainly did a bad turn by Mary Hallock Foote — herself a writer, whose words sometimes appear almost verbatim in Repose, and the basis for one of Stegner's characters — and Foote's family.
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