For this Bison Books edition, James Welch, the acclaimed author of "Winter in the Blood" (1986) and other novels, introduces Mildred Walker's vivid heroine, Ellen Webb, who lives in the dryland wheat country of central Montana during the early 1940s. He writes, "It is a story about growing up, becoming a woman, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, within the space of a year and a half. But what a year and a half it is " Welch offers a brief biography of Walker, who wrote nine of her thirteen novels while living in Montana.

In this family saga, generations mine the Vermont earth and come to rest in it. Lyman Converse is too young to fight in the Civil War, but he lives to see his own son enlist in World War I. Through all the years his closest friend is Easy, an escaped black slave who took refuge in his father’s house. Everything Converse values most is gradually lost to time, including the family-owned soapstone quarry. The Quarry invites readers to escape into private lives worth caring about—and to feel the national history that they could not escape. Originally published in 1947 and considered one of Mildred Walker’s richest novels, The Quarry is introduced by Ripley Hugo, Walker’s daughter. Hugo edited, with James Welch, The Real West Marginal Way: A Poet’s Autobiography by Richard Hugo.

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.

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.

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.

John Davis has a "dull aching sense of missing out, of not getting anywhere." There must be millions like him, he thinks. His relations with his wife, Serena, are shallow and unsatisfying. In the late 1930s, he tries to rekindle their marriage by bringing her to a special place from his past-the Montana mountains. He is chagrined when she asks other people to join them on the camping trip. Plans are further disrupted by a catastrophe-a forest fire that rages uncontrolled for three days. Forced to reach outward to others in this crisis, the members of the party ultimately have to face themselves as well. Unless the Wind Turns is fast-moving and psychologically nuanced. Purchase the audio edition.

"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."

Harriet Ryegate, the proper daughter of Massachusetts Puritans, is the first white woman to go far into the wilderness beyond the upper Missouri. With her husband, a Baptist minister, she seeks to convert the Blackfoot Indians to Christianity. But it is the Ryegates who are changed by their "journey into strangeness." Marcus Ryegate returns to Massachusetts obsessed by a beautiful Indian woman. For sermonizing about her, he pays a heavy price. Harriet, one of Mildred Walker's most fully realized characters, writes in her journal about "the effect of the Wilderness on civilized persons who are accustomed to live in the world of words." "If a Lion Could Talk" reveals the tragic lack of communication that stretches from Massachusetts to Missouri and beyond in the years before the Civil War--and the appalling heart of darkness that is close to home.

Stuck in the middle of Nebraska in the late nineteenth century, Julia Hauser felt restless. "The four walls of her parlor bound her world too securely," writes Mildred Walker. But what could she do? She was married to a dull small-town merchant and soon confined by children. She lacked money and social position. "Light from Arcturus" shows how Julia stepped beyond sacrifice and duty, impressed herself on a larger scene, fed her spirit, and grew in dignity. Grounded in memorable events, this novel illustrates the significance of the period's great world's fairs to the early settlers. The milestones in Julia's progress are trips to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 and to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893 and in 1933. Readers of the early prairie novels of Willa Cather will recognize Julia Hauser. Recent Bison Book reprints of "Winter Wheat," "Fireweed," and "The Curlew's Cry" have renewed interest in the novels of Mildred Walker. "Light from Arcturus," originally published in 1935, is introduced to a new generation of readers by Mary Swander, author of "Driving the Body Back" and "Heaven and Earth House."

At eighty-three Marcia Elder was alert and active but felt insecure about facing another winter alone, yet she dreaded giving up her old home and entering a re-tirement facility. So, with great resourcefulness, she advertised for a companion and eventually staked out a corner of her own--one with a view. Mildred Walker's skill as a storyteller never falters in this portrayal of an elderly woman who won't give up.

The Curlew's Cry is the story of three decades in the life of Pamela Lacey and a Montana town. Descended from pioneers and the daughter of a rancher, Pamela lives according to her own script, and nothing seems to happen as expected. The world beats on - World War I, the influenza epidemic of 1917, the Great Depression - and local fortunes rise and fall with the price of beef. For Pamela the fight that counts is defined by a sense of independence and pervasive loneliness, by the twists and turns of love and friendship. Tragic events transpire, but by the end of The Curlew's Cry it is clear that, if Montana brings out the best in man, it is also a place where women like Pamela can achieve power and magnanimity.

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.

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.