Lorna Doone Beers (1897–1989)

Lorna Doone Beers was born in Maple Plain, Minnesota, the youngest of five children in a farming family. She grew up in a hardworking community that had been on the frontier only a few years earlier.
Unusually for a young woman of her era, she attended the University of Minnesota, where her professors encouraged her writing. After graduation, she won a teaching assistant position on the faculty. She later studied at the University of Michigan and George Washington University. In 1920, she married Clyde Raymond Chambers, a businessman, with whom she had a son. Lorna wrote three novels in the decade between 1922 and 1932 that achieved national acclaim; all of them were set in the northern plains. The first book, Prairie Fires (1925), was lauded in three separate issues of The New Yorker. The next book, A Humble Lear (1929), was described by an Ohio reviewer as "an amazingly gripping novel of farm life."
The Mad Stone (1932) won an Avery Hopwood Award at the University of Michigan. Despite this early success, Lorna never published another novel. Her time and energies were increasingly consumed by caring for her husband. In the 1950s, Lorna wrote two popular books for young people, The Book of Hugh Flower (1952) and The Crystal Cornerstone (1955). In 1966, she published Wild Apples and North Wind, her memoir of living in a 150-year-old farmhouse in Vermont. Through the 1960s and into the 1970s, Lorna was a frequent contributor of poetry, stories, and short pieces to publications such as Harper's, Yankee, The New England Galaxy, The Sign, and the Christian Science Monitor. One of her poems was selected for inclusion in Fire and Sleet and Candlelight, an anthology devoted to works on fantasy and the macabre.