Robb Forman Dew – författare

Agnes Scofield, the heroine of Dew's lovely, low-key period piece, can join Mrs. Ramsay and Mrs. Bridge at the tea table of exquisitely etched literary matrons. A respectable Ohio widow with three grown children, Agnes is beginning to carve out an independent middle-aged life for herself (which includes a secret lover) when, in 1947, her children all suddenly return to town. They have full lives of their own, but take for granted that Mother will always put supper on the table and never step outside her role as self-sacrificing, sexless matriarch. Dew's achievement is to capture both Agnes' ambivalence about these demands and the dignity in her struggle to meet them." -Entertainment Weekly (Editor's Choice)

After teaching and raising her family for most of her life, Agnes Scofield realizes she is truly weary of her routine. But how, at 51, to establish a separate identity? Her newfound freedom may not sit so well with the rest of the Scofields, who operate strictly within the confines of polite Midwestern values. They'd be polite to Hitler if need be. But underneath the façade, private triumphs and tragedies - including struggles with alcoholism and illicit affairs - simmer, and Agnes finds herself becoming even more entangled in the family web. BEING POLITE TO HITLER is a richly wrought portrait of a woman coming into her own in the middle of her life and a family that experiences passions, joys, and grief against the backdrop of the post-WWII era.

On a bright September day in 1888, in the town of Washburn, Ohio, three children are born within hours of one another - Robert Butler, Lily Scofield, and Lily's first cousin, Warren - and they are nearly inseparable from birth. When Robert and Lily marry, Lily feels assured that she will always have as her own the two people she has most loved all her life. The charmed circle Lily has long imagined is threatened when Agnes Claytor, a young woman from another prominent Washburn family, falls in love with Warren Scofield - disrupting not only life within the Scofield and Claytor families but in the small town of Washburn itself. At its heart, THE EVIDENCE AGAINST HER is about romance - the romance of the close ties of childhood, the romance of new love, of ambition, and of family myth. Although it is the women of these families who bear the brunt of the responsibility for family happiness, the 'her' of the title is as slippery and hard to pin down as the evidence itself.

This story explores themes of familial and romantic bonds as it tells of a woman whose husband stays behind in New England while she and their children spend the summer in her Midwestern hometown.

FORTUNATE LIVES reprises the Howells family, who first appeared in DALE LOVES SOPHIE TO DEATH and tells the story of another fateful summer of transition for the family. The Howells family are revisited in the small academic town of West Bradford, Ma in the summer of 1991. Dinah and Martin's middle son Toby died in an automobile crash six years earlier. David, 18, is preparing to go to Harvard and Sarah is now 13. A young woman, Netta Breckenridge, enters the family's lives and creates a fragile domesticity for the Howells.

Claudia an Avery Parks, lovers since high school, are now in their thirties. Intelligent, charming, sympathetic, they seem to be the ideal couple, the perfect dinner-party guests, almost everything people should be - except responsible. They are casually yet cruelly oblivious to the ways in which their words and actions affect other people, most particularly their talented 11-year-old daughter, who suffers the misfortune of being treated by her parents not as a child but as an equal.

Robb Forman Dew first began collecting her Thanksgiving recipes at the request of a cousin who hadn't cooked before. In A Southern Thanksgiving, she gathers them into a cookbook--both practical and literary--for an easy-to-prepare, sumptuous Southern feast. In recreating the ambiance of her remembered Thanksgivings in the South, she found that planning ahead is crucial. A Southern Thanksgiving includes recipes for such delicious dishes as Yams Mousseline, Roast Turkey with Gravy and Cornbread Dressing, and Lalie's Pumpkin Chiffon Pie with Gingersnap Crust--many of which can be made weeks ahead and frozen.Dew offers such an effortless strategy for preparing the Thanksgiving meal that both you and your guests will have the time to enjoy the day together. Hers is a book to be treasured, savored, and used by first-time cooks and experienced hosts alike.