About this item
Tuesday, June 18, 2019 ~ 12:00pm In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, bored by society luncheons, charity work, and the effete men who courted them, left their families in Auburn, New York, to teach school in the wilds of northwestern Colorado. They lived with a family of homesteaders in the Elkhead Mountains and rode to school on horseback, often in blinding blizzards. Their students walked or skied, in tattered clothes and shoes tied together with string. The young cattle rancher who had lured them west, Ferry Carpenter, had promised them the adventure of a lifetime. He hadn’t let on that they would be considered dazzling prospective brides for the locals. Nearly a hundred years later, Dorothy Wickenden, the granddaughter of Dorothy Woodruff, found the teachers’ buoyant letters home, which captured the voices of the pioneer women, the children, and other unforgettable people the women got to know.
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.
