As in Chekhov's play "The Three Sisters," the characters in Mildred Walker's "Orange Tree" search for meaning and happiness in their often uneventful middle-class lives--and yet from such a seemingly ordinary premise, subtle and defining drama ensues. Editing Walker's last novel, which the author reworked for nearly two decades, Carmen Pearson has found indications that the Chekhov play had in fact been a template that Walker contemporized in "The Orange Tree,"
The novel centers on two families living in Boston in the 1970s: an older couple, Tiresa and Paulo Romano, and the newlyweds Olive and Ron Fifer. The fragile state of the older woman's health and the younger woman's marriage brings these two couples together in their separate and quietly desperate isolation, producing a combination of insight and compassion that only the finest story can evoke. In "The Orange Tree," Walker explores the relationships between men and women and offers an absorbing commentary on literature, writing, education, middle-class life, and the nature of friendship and of death.

"Modernism and Mildred Walker" is the first full-length critical study of the major fictional works of this American author whose life spanned the twentieth century (1905-98) and whose literary production spanned almost three-quarters of a century. A highly regarded chronicler of New England and the American West, she is also appreciated for her portrayal of women characters and the complexity of women's roles. Long beloved by readers of Montana fiction, Mildred Walker's novels have been dismissed by some critics as only of regional interest, and, as Carmen Pearson argues, have not been explored and appreciated from other critical perspectives and by other audiences. In this persuasive new study, Pearson offers a new and decidedly western interpretation of Modernism as a critical tool and proposes a variety of readings and interpretations designed to emphasize the relationship between cultural production in the West and modernism. She encourages readers and students of literature to reappraise Walker's work and to undertake further critical studies of their own.