Bess Streeter Aldrich was one of Nebraska's most widely read and
enjoyed authors. Her writing career spanned forty-some years,
during which she published over 100 short stories and articles,
nine novels, one novella, two books of short stories, and one
omnibus. In her work, she emphasized family values and recorded
accurately Midwest pioneering history. A Lantern in her Hand is
based on her own family history.
Learn more about her at bessstreeteraldrich.com.
“Piercingly beautiful. . . . Aldrich’s pioneer woman was based on
her mother, and the integrity of her depiction of life in a sod
house in the late nineteeth-century Nebraska speaks to her readers.
. . . In her own introduction Aldrich writes of wanting to tell her
mother’s story after her mother’s death: ‘Other writers had
depicted the Midwest’s early days, but so often they had pictured
their women as gaunt, browbeaten creatures, despairing women whom
life seemed to defeat. That was not my mother. Not with her
courage, her humor, her nature that would cause her to say at the
end of her life: ‘We had the best time in the world.’”—Belles
Lettres
“The language is good and sturdy and dotted with imaginative
metaphors and similes (‘Silence, so deep, that it roared in its
vast vacuum’). If the book tries to crowd too much life into 300
pages, well, there was a lot of life: ‘We old pioneers,’ Abbie says
at the end, ‘we dreamed dreams into the country.’”—Milwaukee
Journal
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