120, [8] pages. Illustrations. Cover has some wear and soiling. Previous

120, [8] pages. Illustrations. Cover has some wear and soiling. Previous owner's mailing label on first page. Margaret Craven (March 13, 1901-July 19, 1980) was an American writer. Margaret went to Stanford University (Palo Alto, California) where she majored in history, Upon her graduation with distinction in 1924, she moved to San Jose, California, where she took a job as secretary to the managing editor of the Mercury Herald. She soon found herself writing the editorials, first over the editor's initials, then over her own. After the death of the editor, Margaret moved back to Palo Alto and began writing short stories for magazines such as the Delineator. In 1941 the Saturday Evening Post began accepting her stories. She continued contributing stories to the Post for the next 20 years, although seriously hindered by near-blindness caused by a bacterial infection of the eyes. It was largely owing to her vision problem that during this period she did not write novels, but the problem was overcome around 1960. She had learned about the Native-Americans of the northern British Columbia coast. The first result of this was a story for the Post called "Indian Outpost." In 1962, Margaret arranged with the Columbia Coast Mission of the Anglican Church to visit Kingcome and other native Kwakwaka'wakw (Kwakiutl) villages on the B.C. coast. Out of this experience came her first novel, I Heard the Owl Call My Name, which became a best seller. Margaret published a second novel, Walk Gently This Good Earth (1977), an autobiography, Again Calls the Owl (1980), and a collection of stories, The Home Front (1981). To become a writer, she chose loneliness. To write a bestseller, she embraced a rugged land. Deceptively simple in style, stunning in its implications, this gem of an autobiography carries readers back to the beginning of the century when Margaret Craven, one a handful of women at Stanford and a groundbreaking woman journalist, made the audacious decision not to work for a living, but to work as a writer. Here Margaret Craven brings vividly to life an idyllic childhood which suddenly vanishes; advice from a red-robed Gertrude Stein propped up in bed; a nearly tragic battle with blindness; and a fateful trip to a magnificently wild Pacific Northwest, a town called Kingcome...and her emergence, at sixty-nine, as a women who realized a dream.