About this item

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.



About the Author

Dorothy Wickenden

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.



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