Jessamyn West

Set in the early 19th century in the Ohio Territory, this is the story of a farm family. Leafy Rivers, whose first baby is on the way, recalls the past. Her recollections reveal the crisis in her marriage, and the difficult birth alters the relationship between husband and wife.

Lives and loves of the hundred-odd people of "the Tract," a farming community to the south of Los Angeles, founded in 1916.

Episodic chapters about the Birdwell family, nineteenth century Quakers living in Indiana during the period following the Civil War.

"The stories in Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team were written by Jessamyn West between 1939 and 1955 and evoke a world that seems now very distant. Most are set in rural California among farmers and small town merchants when life was slow and the outside world was very far away. The most advanced technology was radio and the sound equipment that Leonard Hobart sets up at the baseball field in the small town of Tennant in the story "Public-Address System." The pressure of conformity from suburbia had not reached most of these people. Being eccentric was not only tolerated, it was almost expected."

These further adventures of Jess and Eliza Birdwell, the beloved hero and heroine of ''The Friendly Persuasion,'' are cause for celebration to the millions who have met them in Jessamyn West's memorable book. Here are those gallant Quakers, young and in love, meeting the challenges of nature and man as the growing family travels westward, then encountering the bitterness and savagery that explode into the Civil War, later guiding their children through the confusing aftermath, and, finally, looking at their world with bittersweet maturity. For all its fascinating differences, their world confronts dilemmas strikingly contemporary - youthful rebellion, racial intolerance, social inequity, and warfare's misery. To each, Miss West brings deep and meaningful insights.**

Christie Fraser went to court Cate Conboy on Xmas Eve 1899. He had only met her once at his cousins sociable. During his visit he learned a lot about Cate, her family, and the inmated of the Poor Farm her father ran. The reader learns what happed to Cate's courtship and what role the "diggers" played.

The author writes about her struggle with tuberculosis and about her sister's courage in the face of incurable cancer.

Includes writings about Quakers by George Fox, William Penn, Walt Whitman, Elizabeth Gray Vining, John Woolman, Thomas Carlyle, John Greenleaf Whittier, D. Elton Trueblood, and Stuart Chase, among others.

The leader of the people / John Steinbeck Mr. Know-all / W. Somerset Maugham Vanka / Anton Chekhov The happy prince / Oscar Wilde The old demon / Pearl S. Buck The sailor-boy's tale / Isak Dinesen Young Archimedes / Aldous Huxley Butch minds the baby / Damon Runyon Suspicion / Dorothy L. Sayers Hautot and his son / Guy de Maupassat The open boat / Stephen Crane My Oedipus complex / Frank O'Connor The snows of Kilimanjaro / Ernest Hemingway A letter to God / Gregorio López y Fuentes The little Bouilloux girl / Colette The ruby / Corrado Alvaro Six feet of the country / Nadine Gordimer [The boarding house]( / James Joyce The brute / Joseph Conrad A double game / Alberto Moravia Maternity / Lilika Nakos Lead her like a pigeon / Jessamyn West God sees the truth, but waits / Leo Tolstoy The walker-through-walls / Marcel Ayme [The lottery]( / Shirley Jackson The McWilliamses and the burglar alarm / Mark Twain The Augsburg chalk circle / Bertolt Brecht The overcoat / Sally Benson Blind MacNair / Thomas H. Raddall The procurator of Judaea / Anatole France The open window / Saki (H.H. Munro) María Concepción / Katherine A. Porter My Lord, the baby / Rabindranath Tagore The end of the party / Graham Greene Modern children / Sholom Aleichem Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald Carrion spring / Wallace Stegner Just lather, that's all / Hernando Téllez The secret life of Walter Mitty / James Thurber The rocking-horse winner / D.H. Lawrence The Sunday menace / Robert Benchley The Mezzotint /Montague R. James The alligators / John Updike Pelageya / Mikhail Zoshchenko Haircut / Ring Lardner The burning city / Hjalmar Söderberg Fireworks for Elspeth / Rumer Godden The old chief Mshlanga / Doris Lessing Who cares? / Santha Rama Rau Over the river and though the wood / John O'Hara Dental or mental, I say it's spinach / S.J. Perelman The drover's wife / Henry Lawson The huntsmen / Paul Horgan The guest / Albert Camus Patience / Nigel Balchin Among the paths to Eden / Truman Capote Admiral's night / Machado de Assis The bet / Anton Chekhov The man who could work miracles / H.G. Wells A country love story / Jean Stafford A worn path / Eudora Welty The outstation / W. Somerset Maugham A priest in the family / Leo Kennedy The cop and the anthem / O. Henry Marriage á la mode / Katherine Mansfield The nightingale / Maxim Gorky The launch / Max Aub The wreath / Luigi Pirandello The eighty-yard run / Irwin Shaw You were perfectly fine / Dorothy Parker Luzina takes a holiday / Gabrielle Roy