About this item
This exhilarating saga about two intrepid young women who leave the affluence of their New York home to teach school on the Western frontier in 1916 is authentically created using actual letters home and interviews with descendants.Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood attended grade school and Smith College together, spent nine months on a grand tour of Europe in 1910, and then, bored with society luncheons and chaperoned balls and not yet ready for marriage, they went off to teach the children of homesteaders in a remote schoolhouse on the Western Slope of Colorado. They traveled on the new railroad over the Continental Divide and by wagon to Elkhead, a tiny settlement far from the nearest town. Their students came to school from miles away in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. Dorothy Woodruff was the grandmother of New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden. Nearly one hundred years later, Wickenden found the buoyant, detailed, colorful letters the two women wrote to their families. Through them, she has chronicled their trials in the classroom, the cowboys and pioneering women they met, and the violent kidnapping of a close friend. Central to their narrative is Ferry Carpenter, the witty, idealistic, and occasionally outrageous young lawyer and cattle rancher who hired them, in part because he thought they would make attractive and cultivated brides. None of them imagined the transforming effect the year would have - on the children, the families, and the teachers.Wickenden set out on her own journey to discover what two intrepid Eastern women found when they went West, and what America was like at that uncertain moment, with the country poised for the First World War, but going through its own period of self-discovery. Drawing upon the letters, interviews with descendants, research about these vanished communities, and trips to the region, Wickenden creates a compelling, original saga about the two intrepid young women and the "settling up" of the West.
About the Author
Dorothy Wickenden became the Executive Editor of The New Yorker in January 1996. She joined the magazine as Managing Editor in March 1995. She also writes for the magazine and is the moderator of its weekly podcast "The Political Scene. " Wickenden is on the faculty of The Writers' Institute at CUNY's Graduate Center, where she teaches a course on narrative nonfiction. Previously, Wickenden was National Affairs Editor at Newsweek from 1993 - 1995. Before that, she spent fifteen years at The New Republic, first as Managing Editor and later as Executive Editor. She edited "The New Republic Reader: 80 Years of Opinion and Debate" (Basic Books, 1994) , an anthology of New Republic pieces. Ms. Wickenden has also written for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, the Washington Post, and the Wilson Quarterly. A member of Phi Beta Kappa and a magna cum laude graduate of Hobart and William Smith Colleges, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard in 1988-1989. She served as a member of the Colleges' Board of Trustees from 1994-1998. Wickenden lives with her husband and two daughters in Westchester, New York.
