To become a writer, she chose loneliness. To write a bestseller, she embraced a rugged land.

Deceptively simple in style, stunning in its implications, this gem of an autobiography carries readers back to the beginning of the century when Margaret Craven—one a handful of women at Stanford and a groundbreaking woman journalist—made the audacious decision not to work for a living, but to work as a writer.

Here Margaret Craven brings vividly to life an idyllic childhood which suddenly vanishes; advice from a red-robed Gertrude Stein propped up in bed; a nearly tragic battle with blindness; and a fateful trip to a magnificently wild Pacific Northwest, a town called Kingcome . . . and her emergence, at sixty-nine, as a women who realized a dream.