RARE "American Novelist" Mildred Walker Hand Signed 3X5 Card For Sale

Up for sale a RARE! "American Novelist" Mildred Walker Hand Signed 3X5 Card. 

2, 1905 – May 27, 1998) was an American novelist who published 12 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 died in

1998 in Portland, Oregon. Mildred

Walker was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on

May 2, 1905. Her father was a Baptist minister and her mother a school teacher. She and her family spent summers at a vacation

home in Grafton, Vermont. In 1926

she graduated magna cum laude in literature from Wells College in Aurora, New York. 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 also completed her first

novel "Fireweed". Earnings from this book allowed the Walker and her

family to move to Great Falls, Montana in

1933. Her husband Ferdinand joined the Great-Falls Clinic where he practiced as

a cardiologist and surgeon. In

1944 Walker published "Winter Wheat". Income from this book allowed

the family to move to a new home christened Beaverbank on the Missouri River, ten miles south of Great Falls. In 1955,

Schemm died of heart failure. His death left Walker widowed and alone, as her

three children were grown. Walker returned to Wells College where she taught

creative writing and literature. From 1961 to 1962 she was a Fulbright lecturer in Kyoto, Japan. In 1964 she traveled to Sicily, Italy on sabbatical. She was twice a staff

member at the summer Breadloaf Conference in Vermont. 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

Castleton University (where her grandson, Oliver Schemm now teaches Art),

completing a historical novel titled "If a Lion Could Talk" and 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 10 years

lessened her abilities until she could no longer speak or drive. In 1990,

she moved to a retirement home in Portland, OR to be closer to her eldest son's family. She

died in Portland on May 27, 1998. Her last novel, "The Orange Tree"

remained unfinished at the time of her death. Walker published her first novel,

"Fireweed," in 1934, while she attended the University of Michigan as

a graduate student. "Fireweed" earned Walker the Avery Hopwoood

Award, the biggest prize then awarded from an American University, and $1,500. This income enabled Walker and her family to

move to Great Falls, Montana. 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. In

1935 Walker published "Light from Arcturus". It was the January 1939

selection of the Literary Guild of America which called her "a master of

the novel form".[2] The Literary Guild went on to predict that the

novel was sure to launch her from obscurity to an American writer of great

importance. In

1941, she published "Unless the Wind Turns," her first novel set in

Montana. In 1944, Winter Wheat was published. In 1955, Walker published

"The Curlew’s Cry". In that same year, Schemm died. 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 for 18 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 the author and scholar Carmen Pearson and published

posthumously in 2006 by the University of Nebraska Press. All of Walker’s

novels were first published by Harcourt, Brace & Co. By the mid 1970s her

novels were mostly out of print. In 1992, the University of Nebraska press

began reissuing all of her works, starting with "Winter Wheat". In 2003 "Winter Wheat" was chosen by

the Montana Center for the Book as the "One Book Montana" subject for

reading discussions throughout the state.