A quiet book along familiar lines, as Elliott Merrick tells of the
depression years' experiment on a Green Mountain farm. From several
months on a rented farm, through the purchase- for $1,000 of a farm
of their own, this recounts chronologically in essay form, the
arduous, impoverished years of inexperienced farming, the beauties
of the Green Mountains and rural Vermont, the local characters and
personalities, the neighborly errands of mercy and friendship,
skiing and the descent on the Merrick's of long lost friends over
ski weekends. The author combined with his farming periods of
teaching, working for the agricultural service, trips to see his NY
publisher- and always writing. An experienced craftsman, he writes
vividly and well. (Kirkus Reviews)
In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, Elliott Merrick and
his wife bought a ramshackle farm on a Vermont hillside for $1,000.
Merrick, a young writer with a healthy dose of idealism and a
determination to live in the country, had just sold his first book
to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's. "I had an idea that I would be
rich and famous henceforth," Merrick wrote, but added, "nothing
could be farther from the truth . . . As I look back, I'm amazed
that we could so blithely have crossed our great Rubicon on a
spiderweb. But it turned out to be one of those fortunate
mistakes-one of those fraught-with-peril enterprises that you might
never have embarked on if you had known the consequences-like being
born, for instance." Green Mountain Farm describes Merrick's and
his family's often haphazard attempts to make a go of it on these
stony, wintry acres, in a house that was falling down around them.
As Merrick puts it, "We did everything wrong, but it came out
right." They were dirt poor, but through it all, believed
wholeheartedly in going directly after the things they wanted most:
to write and to farm, however they could. A lyrical, funny, richly
fulfilling book about old houses, farming, writing, and the joys of
country life, this book is as fresh today as when it was originally
published more than fifty years ago.
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