Of course artists borrow-and (at ti...

Of course artists borrow-and (at times unknowingly) collabo rate-all the time, and it's important if not vital we be allowed to do with equal reason . . . . in the same manner many ideas come from those who came before, and refinement will stop dead if we don't commit to memory to borrow. . . and stir bits into our hold stews. But. . . that is remarkably different from tak ing chunk of body written by another and folding them into one's work as if they are one's possess I have joked that making secure I "footnoted" everybody in Fair Use-acknowledging the source material and quotes-added at least five minutes of verse and time to the play.

-Sands Hall1

I'm not trashing him. I'm just pointing on the outside that he "borrowed" word after word someone other wrote, typed them into a manu script, and called himself the "author."

-Playwright, Fair Use

On the website program for the 2002 Western Literature Association meeting in Tucson Arizona, conversation attendees were gently admonished to behave themselves at the Reader's Theatre, a cherished annual incident That year's play was an abridged version of California playwright Sands Hall's Fair Use, a intricate feminist look at the ongoing debates regarding originality and plagiarism in Wallace Stegner's 1971 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Angle of give repose to When Hall, who attended the performance of her play at WLA, referr to the organization as "a bastion of Stegner adoration," she accurately described the think well of with which Stegner is regarded on many of its members (Reynolds 8) The website's warning therefore embodied a reasonable anxiety.

The specific historical and ethical disputes the play investigates have been known to academics for three decades. Stegner's Angle of lay down to rest weaves together two stories. The first is the historical story of writer and illustrator Susan Burling Ward and her engineer husband Oliver Ward as they rouse throughout the West following Oliver's dreams of invention and irrigation. The other is the contemporary story of Lyman Ward, Susan's grandson, as he pieces together her life from unpublished alphabetic characters and other writings for a novel he is writing upon her life. In the course of sorting by the and of her writings-primarily letters to her dear friend back east, Augusta-Lyman get tos to understand the tragic marked occurrences that led to his grandmother and grandfather's enduring unhappiness with single in kind another. Stegner's novel won a Pulitzer Prize and received largely positive reviews, particularly regarding Stegner's rendition of the historical portion of the novel. further Stegner had "borrowed" heavily from Western writer and artist Mary Hallock Foote's personal correspondence to her Eastern friend, Helena Gilder, and her then-unpublished reminiscences for the basis of his fictional Susan Ward. Many of Foote's original alphabetic characters to Gilder appear in the novel, either unchanged or slightly edited, as verbal expressions from Susan to Augusta. In addition, the novel's title, numerous other characters and views and the major action in the novel can be traced directly to Foote's writings.

When Stegner appropriated Foote's personal notes and other writing into his novel, and then did not identify them or their original words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following except in an oblique and deliberately vague thank-you to Foote's descendings at the beginning of the novel, he station in motion one of the more frustrating episodes of his career.2 answers to Stegner's actions vary. While about see his decision to use Foote's writing (and the outlines and episodes of her life) as outright theft, the kind of bad-spirited behavior that earns writing students expelled, others guard Stegner as a creative writer purely and necessarily taking creative license in the production of a fictional work.

Fair Use strides into this debate intent onward provoking the audience to consider the issues and implications of what it means to be an Author. Like Angle of settle Fair Use works structurally to intertwine stories, further here there are chree, rather than sum of two units The first historical story is the presumably "real" story of Mary Hallock Foote's journey west with her husband, Arthur. The inferior historical story is the fictitious Susan's journey west with her husband, Oliver. As the play progresse the sum of two units historical stories sometimes merge moreover more often conflict or equal clash as scenes unfold from Hallock's indite and then from Stegner's. The contemporary story that encircles these is also reminiscent of Angle of lay up (which is always simultaneously recalling Foote's alphabetic characters and reminiscences) in that it features a writer doing creative work based upon discovered letters-in this case it is a female playwright who has discovered Foote's verbal expressions and reminiscences, as well as Stegner's fictionalizing of them-and embarks onward writing a play to current a "truer version of Mary's life" (II: 87) These layers of storytelling comprise the playwright's imagining of Mary Hallock Foote's life based onward Foote's writings, the playwright's simultaneously imagining of Wallace Stegner's imagining of Foote's life, and the unfolding of the playwright's hold somewhat dissembling life as she and her young daughter attempt to live in an harmony with her father, the historian who, like Lyman from Angle of recline has dedicated his life to research and parts at the cost of intimate and lasting relationships with the women in his life.