(person) by junkpile Sat Oct 21 2000 at 15:59:59

Walter Edmonds was born in 1904, near the Black River in northern Oneida County, New York. He graduated from Harvard in 1926. While a student, he published several works, and began writing professionally at the urging of a professor. He served on Harvard's Board of Overseers from 1944 to 1950.

In his writing, Edmonds often drew on the history of upstate New York, and his own keen observations of rural life. The key to his success, according to one of his editors, was his ability to "give the common man his due."

Drums Along the Mohawk, the story of the settling of the Mohawk Valley in New York during the years of the American Revolution, was a best-selling book, and was made into a movie in 1939.

He won the Newbery in 1942 for his children's book The Matchlock Gun.

Edmonds died on January 6, 1998.

The UPenn address at the bottom is a page where a guy lists all the bad books he's been reading and why they are bad and just how bad they are. On a friend's recommendation, he read Edmonds' Rome Haul and decided it wasn't too bad, though "perfectly loopy, to be sure: its plot is long on coincidence and short on conviction." Still, he gives it a passing grade.


Books:

Bert Breen's Barn

The Boyds of Black River: A Family Chronicle

Drums Along the Mohawk

In the Hands of the Senecas

The Matchlock Gun   (1942 Newbery Award)

Mostly Canallers: Collected Stories

Rome Haul

Seven American Stories

Tales My Father Never Told

Time to Go House


thanks to:
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/01.29/WalterDEdmondsF.html
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~traister/touts-1998.html
www.amazon.com

I like it!

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