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.

"You are either a Mildred Walker enthusiast," as the "Philadelphia Inquirer" once declared, "or you are missing one of the best writers on the American scene." As Mildred Walker's daughter, Ripley Hugo was in the latter category. This biography of the author of thirteen celebrated novels is also Hugo's search for the writing life of a mother known to her children as a socially correct middle-class doctor's wife rather than as the ambitious, imaginative, often struggling novelist she was as well. Drawing on family memories, letters, diaries, reviews, and, in particular, the notebooks that Mildred Walker (1905-1998) kept for each novel, Hugo fashions an absorbing account of how her mother's characters emerged in the landscapes that she visited again and again: Vermont, the Midwest, and, most frequently, Montana, the setting for the classic "Winter Wheat." Alongside this developing picture of a writer at work--shaping her contribution to western America's literary history over half a century--Hugo shows us the proper mother and social creature as carefully and consciously crafted; between the two lovingly detailed portrayals, we glimpse the depths of a life thus divided.

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.