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Mildred Schemm Walker was an American novelist who published 13 novels and was nominated for the National Book Award. She graduated from Wells College and from the University of Michigan. She was a faculty member at Wells College from 1955 to 1968. Walker passed away in 1998 in Portland, OR.

Biography: Mildred Schemm Walker was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1905. Her father was a Baptist minister and her mother a school teacher. Growing up, Walker was nicknamed “Pep” by her classmates for her “idealistic and high-spirited” personality. She and her family spent summers at a vacation home in Grafton, Vermont. In 1926 she graduated from Wells College in Aurora, N.Y. In 1927 she enrolled in graduate school at the University of Michigan where she met and married Dr. Ferdinand Schemm. The couple had three children. Walker earned a Master’s degree from the University of Michigan and while also completing her first novel “Fireweed”. Earnings from this book allowed the Schemm Walker family to move to Great Falls, Montana in 1933. Schemm joined the Great-Falls Clinic where he practiced as a physician and surgeon, specializing in cardiology.

In 1944 Walker published “Winter Wheat”, her most widely read novel. Income from this book allowed the family to move to a new home on the Missouri River, christened “Beavercreek”, ten miles from Great Falls. In 1955, Schemm passed away from heart failure. His death left Walker widowed and alone, as her three children were grown and attending college. Walker returned to Wells College where she taught creative writing and literature.

In 1968 Walker ended her teaching career at Wells and returned to the Walker family summer home in Grafton, Vermont to concentrate on her writing. She lived there for 18 years, teaching briefly at a small college, completing a historical novel entitled “If a Lion Could Talk” and also writing her only children’s book “A Piece of the World”. In 1986, after having suffered a stroke that limited her physical abilities, she returned to Montana to live with her daughter. A series of strokes over the next ten years left her further debilitated until she could no longer speak or drive. Walker passed away in a care home in Portland, Oregon on May 27th, 1998. Her last novel, “The Orange Tree” remained unfinished at the time of her death.

Career: Walker published her first novel, “Fireweed” in 1934, while she attended the University of Michigan as a graduate student. In the novel, newly wed Celie Linsen longs to escape from a small isolated lumber town in northern Michigan. “Fireweed” earned Walker the Avery and Jule Hopwood Award. Income from the novel enabled Walker and her family to move to Great Falls, Montana. Ferdinand Schemm was highly supportive of Walker’s writing career. He agreed to engage a housekeeper, allowing Walker to devote most of her time to writing. Only Schemm and Roy Cowden, one of Walker’s former University of Michigan’s professors, were allowed to read her work before it was sent off to Walker’s publisher, Harcourt, Brace & Co. (McNamer).

In 1935 Walker published “Light from Arcturus”. In the novel, a woman in small town Nebraska searches for purpose and enlightenment despite her limited social circumstances. In 1938 “Dr.Norton’s Wife” was published, the story of a doctor’s wife diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. “[It] was the January 1939 selection of the Literary Guild of America which called her ‘a master of the novel form’”. The Literary Guild went on to predict that the novel was sure to launch her from obscurity to an American writer of great importance (McNamer).

In 1941, she published “Unless the Wind Turns,” her first novel set in Montana. In 1944, Winter Wheat was published and it became her most widely read and well-regarded novel. In 1955, Walker published “The Curlew’s Cry”. In that same year, Schemm passed away. Walker moved back to New York to teach at Wells College. In 1960, “The Body of a Young Man” was published. Despite mixed reviews, with The New York Times calling her style “pedestrian”, it was nominated for a National Book Award. However, Walker was deeply affected by the negative reviews, describing it as “rejected” and eventually ceasing to refer to the work at all. She began writing her next novel, “If a Lion Could Talk”, an ambitious historical novel centered on missionaries in the American West. In 1968 she retired from Wells College and moved to the Walker family summer house in Grafton, Vermont where she remained 18 for years. There she completed “If a Lion Could Talk”, published in 1970, and her only children’s book, “A Piece of the World”, published in 1972, which tells the story of a rock left behind by a receding glacier.

Starting in 1986, Walker suffered a series of strokes which significantly affected her physical and mental abilities. She continued to work on her last novel “The Orange Tree” until her death in 1998. She spent nearly two decades revising the novel but was unable to complete it before her death. The novel was later edited by Carmen Pearson and published in 2006.

All of Walker’s novels were first published by Harcourt, Brace & Co. By the mid 1970’s her novels were mostly out of print. In 1992, the University of Nebraska press began reissuing all of her works, starting with “Winter Wheat”.

Critical Reception: Walker has traditionally been considered a “regionalist” writer, as her most widely read and well regarded novels “Winter Wheat” and “Curlew’s Cry” are set in the state of Montana. Both are deeply, thematically connected with regional life. They contain a descriptive vivacity and meditative reflection of the natural world akin to Willa Cather’s “My Antonia”. Despite her connection with the region, she is not mentioned in “A Literary History of the American West”. It has been suggested that the publication of A.B Guthrie’s “The Big Sky” and “The Way West”, with its romanticized "mountain man" characters and scenic wildernesses, turned American reader interest away from the modern West to a focus on the vision of a “…prairie-and mountain Eden, always long-gone.” (McNamer). Walker’s work, grounded in the every day life of 19th century women, became less memorable in the shadow of a heroic and mythologized “Old West”.

In the book “Modernity and Mildred Walker”, Carmen Pearson argues against the regionalist label and asserts Walker’s place in modern literature. Pearson contends that Walker was greatly influenced by a diversity of literature during her tenure at Wells College. Walker's later works contain themes of “economic needs, of warfare, of women's changing roles, of evolving technology, and of movement and displacement” (Blew). Pearson writes: “…today, her novels remain relevant and infused with the energy of compromise and the language of movement: her modernism" (Pearson).

Walker’s later novels have traditionally been less well received, leading to an eventual decline in her overall popularity. It has been suggested that her later works are “larded” with heavy handed literary influences and that they lack the “freshness and spontaneity” so appealing in her earlier works. (Brewl). As well, her novels populated with noble and tasteful characters, have not always remained as relevant to the modern reader. Walker’s lifestyle, decidedly non-bohemian and traditional also did not fit well with the ideals of the Modernist movement which valued the rebellious and unconventional.