Arthur de Wint Foote - Personal Life and Controversy

Personal Life and Controversy

In 1876, Foote married the illustrator and writer Mary Hallock Foote (1847–1938) in her hometown of Milton, Ulster County, New York. Their marriage produced a son, Arthur Burling Foote, who followed closely after his father's career footsteps, and two daughters Agnes and Betty. Arthur Foote's biography was written by his wife within her memoirs—which were collected by Rodman Paul and published in 1972 as A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West. Mary Hallock Foote, in her own right, was an important literary and pioneer figure in the history of the old West.

In creating his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Angle of Repose(1972), the twentieth century novelist Wallace Stegner appropriated—with permission—portions of Arthur and Mary Foote's life stories from her memoirs (noted above). Stegner used passages taken directly from Mary Foote's actual letters and recast them as fictionalized correspondence of the novel's main character; his choices resulted in controversy within the literary community that continues today.