Grace Stone Coates: Her Life in Letters

In a small town, a woman of quiet passion and keen intellect lived two lives, the ordinary and the brilliant. Born in Kansas, Grace Stone was a young teacher in Butte, Montana when she married Henderson Coates in 1910. They moved to the fledgling town of Martinsdale. Coates wrote her father that she had been brought "into an alien land." Coates found another life in her writing, corresponding with William Saroyan, a young San Francisco writer who later became one of America's most celebrated writers and always credited Coates with influencing his work. She also shaped writers through her reviews and essays in The Frontier, a prominent literary magazine edited by H.G. Merriam. She regularly exchanged letters with Native American writer Frank Bird Linderman and Charles Russell art historian James Rankin. Coates' historian Lee Rostad has skillfully edited this rich legacy of correspondence into an intimate biography. It is adventure to uncover the real person behind the demure housewife.

Lee Rostad was born in Roundup, Montana, graduated from the University of Montana and spent a year doing graduate work in London, before marrying Phil Rostad, a rancher in the Musselshell Valley. She is the author of several books and has received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Rocky Mountain College in 1995 and the Governor's Award in Humanities in 2001. She currently serves on the Montana Historical Society Board of Trustees.