Bess Streeter Aldrich – författare

The classic story of Abbie and Will Deal—pioneers who left everything behind for a new life on America’s frontier. Abbie Mackenzie dreamed of becoming a fine lady like her aristocratic grandmother, devoting herself to music and art. But at eighteen Abbie found a different dream, turning away from the promise of a comfortable life as a doctor’s wife to marry handsome, quiet Will Deal. Together, they eagerly accepted the challenge of homesteading in Nebraska territory, where the prairies stretched as far as the eye could see, and only the strongest survived for long. For nearly 90 years, reader have cherished Abbie’s story—an inspiring story of struggle against unexpected perils, of love and laughter, of the land she helped conquer and the family she raised.

In the first half of the twentieth century Bess Streeter Aldrich became one of America's best loved, most widely read, and highly paid writers. Her short works appeared in such major journals as Ladies Home Journal, Harper's Weekly, The American Magazine, Colliers, McCalls, and The Saturday Evening Post. Her most famous novel, A Lantern in Her Hand, has remained a favorite since first published in 1928. Her portrayals of pioneers, farm people, small-town residents, their activities, and their relationship with their surroundings won the admiration of the nation. Honest romance, marital concord, and parental love were her constant themes. She was much more concerned with what kept people together than with what drove them apart. Widowed in 1925 with four children who relied on her for support, Aldrich knew all too well the tensions between motherhood and working for pay.  Collected Short Works contains twenty-six works written for publication between 1907 and 1919. Aldrich's admirers now have ready access to works that long ago were relegated to archives and library stacks. Scholars will appreciate how much of herself Aldrich invested in her fiction and how well she appreciated the changes occurring around her.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Bess Streeter Aldrich became one of the most highly paid and widely read American authors of her time. Among the most noteworthy of frontier writers, Aldrich published her short work in such leading magazines as Cosmopolitan, Colliers, Ladies Home Journal, Good Housekeeping, and the Saturday Evening Post. Her most famous novel, A Lantern in Her Hand, has remained a favorite since it was first published in 1928. All of her subsequent novels were also bestsellers. Aldrich's portrayals of pioneers, farm people, and small town traders—their spirit and enterprise—won the admiration of the nation. Unlike such contemporaries as Sinclair Lewis and Hamlin Garland, Aldrich saw the better side of Main Street. Honesty, hard work, friendship, and family life are constant themes in her writings. This second volume of The Collected Short Works brings together over thirty of Aldrich's short stories and essays published between 1920 and 1954, the year of her death. With this collection Aldrich's admirers have ready access to many hard-to-find works. Some of the stories appear here for the first time since their original publication.

As part of its program of books for Nebraska's centennial year, the UNP reprints this best-selling novel by a beloved Nebraska author.

Acclaimed for her 1928 novel A Lantern in Her Hand, Bess Streeter Aldrich became one of the most widely read interpreters of the prairie pioneer experience. In 1935, she published her masterpiece, Spring Came on Forever, a novel of two Nebraska pioneer families from settlement to the 1930s. Elsewhere an artist of the romance, here Aldrich turns romance on its head. The heroine is Amalia Holmsdorfer, one of a band of German immigrants who settle on the prairie. From her late teens to her mid-eighties she confronts and defeats the forces of nature and society that discourage or ruin others. Her life might be a modest triumph but for one detail: she married the wrong man. Quickly paced and precisely drawn, this novel is Aldrich's greatest tribute to the complexity, humor, endurance, and intelligence of the people who settled the prairie. Whatever its sentiments, it has as many cutting edges as a buzz saw.

The true meaning of Christmas emerges in these stories about reunited families, good fellowship, and restored faith. This is not to say that all is sugar candy. The mother in the title story faces a lonely Christmas in an empty house—but then something quite ordinary but miraculous happens. In "The Drum Goes Dead," a small-town bank cashier, a solid citizen and sterling friend, is dispirited by hard times until he discovers, through his own resources, that it is indeed a wonderful life. Here are nine other holiday stories, by turns dramatic, humorous, and inspirational. The closing piece recalls the author's childhood in Iowa. Bess Streeter Aldrich is well remembered for A Lantern in Her Hand, from which Christmas on the Prairie is reprinted, and Spring Came On Forever.

Bess Streeter Aldrich is known for her portrayals of wise and witty women whose identities are strengthened, not smothered, in the bosom of the family. Molly Mason, fifty-two, is the devoted wife of the bank president, mother of four fun-loving Masons, and a reliable standby for the library board, missionary society, and the women's clubs. She has a hand in everything that happens in her midwestern town. In fact, Mother Mason never has any time to do just as she likes. Then one day she makes a headlong dash for liberty—and look out! Bess Streeter Aldrich published stories about the Masons in American magazine during World War I. Homesick American soldiers asked for more, and in 1925 the same family became the subject of Mother Mason.

Abbie Deal, the matriarch of a pioneer Nebraska family, has died at the beginning of A White Bird Flying, leaving her china and heavy furniture to others and to her granddaughter Laura the secret of her dream of finer things. Grandma Deal's literary aspirations had been thwarted by the hard circumstances of her life, but Laura vows that nothing, no one, will deter her from a successful writing career. Childhood passes, and the more she repeats her vow the more life intervenes.

First published in 1928, A Lantern in Her Hand has outlasted literary fashions to touch generations of readers. In this classic story of a pioneer woman, Bess Streeter Aldrich modeled protagonist Abbie Deal on her own mother, who in 1854 had traveled by covered wagon to the Midwest. In A Lantern in Her Hand, Abbie accompanies her family to the soon-to-be-state of Nebraska. There, in 1865, she marries and settles into her own sod house. The novel describes Abbie's years of child-raising, of making a frontier home able to withstand every adversity. A Disciplined writer knowledgeable about true stories of pioneer days in Nebraska, Bess Streeter Aldrich conveys the strength of everyday things, the surprise of familiar faces, and the look of the unspoiled landscape during different seasons. Refusing to be broken by hard experience, Abbie sets a joyful example for her family—and for her readers.