Mildred Walker

Mildred Walker was immediately recognized for the quality of her first fiction in 1934. Fireweed won the prestigious Avery and Jule Hopwood Award. The setting is a small lumber town in Upper Michigan, the stomping grounds of Paul Bunyan and the giants of Swedish, German, and Finnish lore. Young Celie and her husband, Joe Linsen, are the children of Scandinavian pioneers. Radios and flivvers have enlarged her world, and she longs to escape from an isolated place where wild violet fireweed grows to the edge of the woods.

James Cutler, a high school physics teacher, is shattered by the suicide of his most promising student. Hoping to gain perspective and peace of mind, he travels with his wife, Phyllis, to Vermont to spend the summer at the farm of old friends, Josh and Lucy Blair. The Body of a Young Man is a deeply moving story of four people whose friendship asks more than they can give and offers more than they can take. Only in observing another tragedy does James begin to see vulnerability as a virtue and ambiguity as a source of strength.

While visiting her grandmother in Vermont, a young girl's discovery of a huge boulder in the woods of a nearby farm leads her into a special friendship with a boy living there.

Bringing to life the culture of Harlem in the 1920s, Charles Chestnutt's final novel dramatizes the political and aesthetic milieu of the exciting period we now know as the Harlem Renaissance. Mixing fact and fiction, and real and imagined characters, The Quarry is peopled with so many figures of the time - including Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Dubois, and Marcus Garvey - that it constitutes a virtual guide to this inspiring period in American history. Protagonist Glover is a light-skinned man, whose adoptive black parents are determined that he become a leader in the black community. Moving from Ohio to Tennessee, from rural Kentucky to Harlem, his story depicts not only his conflicted relationship to his heritage but also the situation of a variety of black people struggling to escape prejudice and to take advantage of new opportunities.

In 1874 sixteen-year-old Cobie leaves Russia with her five sisters and Mennonite parents to settle on the harsh Kansas prairies and build a new life.

Little Sara Bolster loved the great shining horses that drew the Henkel brewery wagon through the streets of Detroit in the 1880s. Those horses came to signify her fate, for she married the Henkel son and later, as a widow, took over the business. Sara's struggle against the intolerance and hypocrisy of family and friends who disapproved of a woman running a brewery and opening a beer garden makes her a standout among the characters of Mildred Walker. The Brewers' Big Horses recreates the manners and traditions of Germans in America as Prohibition gets up steam.

Dr. Norton's Wife was praised for its quiet honesty and artistic integrity when it was first published in 1938. It stands up firmly as a portrait of a marriage subjected to the strain of unexpected invalidism. As a doctor's wife, Sue Norton is no stranger to matters of life and death. But medical shoptalk screens her from the realities of illness until she is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Never clinical, Walker, herself the wife of a doctor, accurately describes the disease's progress and the adjustments necessary to cope with it. The result is a tender story of "the marriage of true minds."