Bachelor Bess: The Homesteading Letters of Elizabeth Corey, 1909-1919 (American Land & Life) - Softcover

Corey, Paul; Franklin, Wayne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877453039 ISBN 13: 9780877453031

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 1990

Synopsis

In July 1909 twenty-one-year-old Elizabeth Corey left her Iowa farm to stake her claim to a South Dakota homestead. Over the next ten years, as she continued her schoolteaching career and carved out a home for herself in this inhospitable territory, she sent a steady stream of letters to her family back in Iowa. From the edge of modern America, Bess wrote long, gossipy accounts—"our own continuing adventure story," according to her brother Paul—of frontier life on the high plains west of the Missouri River. Irrepressible, independent-minded, and evidently fearless, the self-styled Bachelor Bess gives us a firsthand, almost daily account of her homesteading adventures. We can all stake a claim in her energetic letters.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Green, MD Professor and Chairman of Pediatrics Children's Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University Chicago, Illinois

Wayne Franklin, MD Physician-Director, CME Programs Associate Professor of Pediatrics Children's Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University Chicago, Illinois

Robert R. Tanz, MD Professor of Pediatrics Director, Diagnostic and Consultation Services Children's Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University Chicago, Illinois

This is a very impressive group of authors. Dr. Green is Chairman of Pediatrics at Northwestern, and Physician-in-Chief at Children's Memorial Hospital, one of the top pediatric hospitals in the U.S. (He succeeds James Stockman, who left the position to become President of the American Board of Pediatrics). Dr. Franklin is a pediatric cardiologist who coordinates all CME and recertification review activities for Children's, as such he is expert in the content of the recertification exam and its structure. Dr. Tanz directs the consult service at Children's and thus has a wide breadth of clinical knowledge. All three are widely published in the journal literature but this will be their first book.

Thomas Green, MD Professor and Chairman of Pediatrics Children's Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University Chicago, Illinois

Wayne Franklin, MD Physician-Director, CME Programs Associate Professor of Pediatrics Children's Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University Chicago, Illinois

Robert R. Tanz, MD Professor of Pediatrics Director, Diagnostic and Consultation Services Children's Memorial Hospital/Northwestern University Chicago, Illinois

This is a very impressive group of authors. Dr. Green is Chairman of Pediatrics at Northwestern, and Physician-in-Chief at Children's Memorial Hospital, one of the top pediatric hospitals in the U.S. (He succeeds James Stockman, who left the position to become President of the American Board of Pediatrics). Dr. Franklin is a pediatric cardiologist who coordinates all CME and recertification review activities for Children's, as such he is expert in the content of the recertification exam and its structure. Dr. Tanz directs the consult service at Children's and thus has a wide breadth of clinical knowledge. All three are widely published in the journal literature but this will be their first book.

From Publishers Weekly

Early in this century, a person with determination could change the course of a life by heading west to homestead in places like South Dakota--and, as Elizabeth Corey demonstrates in letters to her family in Iowa, that person could be a single woman. A lively and informative correspondent, Corey uses a multitude of details to flesh out the quotidian activities on her 160-acre claim: designing a brand to mark her stock, sitting for exams to maintain her teaching credentials, juggling meager funds for building materials to improve her property, shooting a rabbit in her garden ("I had to give him a little persuasive gun talk to get him to stay for dinner") and dressing in "three layers of wool all over" as protection from the bitterly cold winters. Often her descriptions bubble with good humor: she suggests a law requiring that all marriage proposals be oral; when they're written, there's no way to stop the man from asking. However, elsewhere Corey ends with the plaintive postscript, "I'm so homesick." Gerber's work includes Critical Essays on Robert Frost. Illustrations not seen by PW .
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0877453039
• ISBN 13: 9780877453031
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 540
• Editor: Gerber Philip L.