In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Legacy 22.2 (2005) 187-195



[Access article in PDF]

Mildred Walker (1905–1998)

University of Houston

Mildred Walker's prodigious literary career began when she was only twenty-one with the publication of an essay titled "Gargoyles," written during her senior year at Wells College, and would eventually culminate with the publication of thirteen novels. Walker entered Wells, a private women's college in New York, under a tuition waiver granted for ministers' daughters in 1922; she was very enthusiastic about this opportunity because she had had ambitions to become a writer since the age of seven. From Wells, she continued her education and literary career at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, receiving her Master's degree in English in 1933, along with the Avery Hopwood Award for her novel Fireweed. The success of this novel and its publication that year by Harcourt Brace initiated a partnership that Walker maintained for nearly half a century and eleven more novels, ending with the 1970 publication of If a Lion Could Talk.

Walker married Ferdinand Schemm in 1927, and the success of Fireweed helped finance the young family's move from the Midwest to Montana. The subsequent success of Winter Wheat enabled the family to move from their bungalow in Great Falls to their acreage on the banks of the Missouri river. Winter Wheat, published in 1944, was her most popular and lucrative novel, but it was by no means her only literary success. In 1939, the Literary Guild of America had chosen Dr. Norton's Wife as their literary selection for January. Her short novel, The Southwest Corner, was transformed in 1954 into a Broadway play and adapted to a Kraft television feature (Walker, Southwest Corner 4). The Body of a Young Man was nominated for the [End Page 187] National Book Award in 1960. During these productive years, Walker also regularly wrote book reviews and short stories and clipped reviews of her own novels from the pages of the New York Times Book Review, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Book of the Month Club Newsletter. Although If a Lion Could Talk (1970) was the last novel by Walker that Harcourt Brace would publish and marked a downturn in her publishing career, the author continued writing for as long as her health permitted. In 1972, Atheneum Press published A Piece of the World. Walker then wrote a novel and a number of short stories and pieces that remained unpublished at her death. By 1992 all of Walker's thirteen novels were out of print; however, she lived long enough to see the commencement of all of their Bison Press republications, beginning with Winter Wheat. This republication marked the beginning of a new wave of critical and popular success that Walker was able to witness in her final years.

Walker was born in Philadelphia, but she always considered her family's summer residence in Grafton, Vermont, her true childhood home. Her mother and father had come from this area of Vermont and found themselves in Pennsylvania because of Walker's father's work as a Baptist minister. However, every summer the family returned to Vermont. In 1916, Walker's father bought the house that the family had rented since 1906, which remains in the Walker family to this day and was Walker's home during her own retirement (Hugo, Writing 3, 245). The influence of these formative years in New England, the area's rich history, landscape, and community found their way into five of her published novels: The Quarry, The Southwest Corner, The Body of a Young Man, If a Lion Could Talk, and A Piece of the World. This Vermont setting is also featured in The Orange Tree, Walker's last novel, to be published posthumously by the University of Nebraska Press in 2006.

In 1927, Walker accepted Ferdinand Schemm's proposal of marriage, although she insisted that she would marry only if she could continue her writing career and "not do the washing" (Hugo, Writing 52). However, she did agree to accompany her husband, a young doctor, to Big Bay in the Upper...

pdf