page_title: Lorna Beers
section_title: Career as a writer
hierarchical_section_title: Lorna Beers / Career as a writer
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the cover of 1932 Lorna Beers novel, The Mad Stone
context_page_description: Lorna Doone Beers was an American novelist, poet, memoirist, and author of children's books. The winner of an early Hopwood Award for fiction, Ms. Beers was viewed by editors at E.P. Dutton in New York as a writer with the literary potential and the mastery of Midwestern themes and voices to become another Ole Rolvaag or even Sinclair Lewis. Her novels are praised for their strong characterizations of modern women, their sensitivity to the forces active in a changing America, and their clear-eyed poet’s view of life in the northern prairies. Her three major novels were written in the ten-year period between 1922 and 1932.
context_section_description: Beers achieved considerable national acclaim for her novels, all of which were set in the northern plains. While still in her mid-twenties, she attracted the interest of major New York publisher E. P. Dutton, whose editors took pains to debut her as a “literary” writer (as opposed to a writer of romances). When Prairie Fires was published in 1925, Louis Kronenberger writing in the Saturday Review of Literature called it "a modern epic of the soil" and "a spacious novel" with "vitality, variety, a power of making its narrative march...."  Respected critic Robert Morss Lovett wrote in The New Republic, “There is something Russian about this book, and there is also something very American about it.” Lovett praised “its truth to essential conditions.” Prairie Fires was lauded in The New Yorker in three separate issues. In 1929 Beers published A Humble Lear, which an Ohio reviewer described “as an amazingly gripping novel of farm life,” and the New York Times Book Review characterized as “absorbing because it is real.” 
  Published in 1932 and the winner of a prestigious Avery Hopwood Award at the University of Michigan, The Mad Stone was enthusiastically promoted by Dutton as “an example of the pure American novel.” It was “a contribution to American literature,” the publisher said. Beers’ career as a serious novelist would last no longer, however, than this eventful ten-year period between the early twenties and the appearance of The Mad Stone.  Despite the early promise, she never published another novel. (The same period was similarly fruitful for another small town Minnesotan, Sinclair Lewis, who was developing some of the same themes in Main Street,  Babbitt, and Elmer Gantry before becoming the first American winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.)
  
  After 1932, and during the decade of the 1940s, Beers attempted no sustained writing efforts as ambitious as novels. Her time and energies were increasingly consumed, she would tell confidants years later, by caring for her husband, who was plagued by emotional problems, including crippling phobias. During this time the couple lived mostly in Summit, New Jersey, within commuting distance of Manhattan where Ray Chambers worked in the investment community. In the 1950s, Beers produced two perennially popular books for young readers that are still being read today, The Book of Hugh Flower (1952) and The Crystal Cornerstone (1955).  In 1966, W.W.Norton published Wild Apples and North Wind, her lyrical and haunting memoir of living on a farm in Vermont. This book brought back some of the passion and intensity of her novels, but at a distant, bittersweet remove from the prairie narratives. Its acute, understated descriptions of the intersections between nature and people echo Robert Frost and anticipate Annie Dillard.
caption: The Mad Stone won the prestigious Hopwood Award in 1932.
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