Green Mountain Farm [Paperback]

In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, Elliott Merrick and his wife bought a ramshackle farm on a Vermont hillside for $1,000. Merrick, a young writer with a healthy dose of idealism and a determination to live in the country, had just sold his first book to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's. I had an idea that I would be rich and famous henceforth, Merrick wrote, but added, nothing could be farther from the truth . . . As I look back, I'm amazed that we could so blithely have crossed our great Rubicon on a spiderweb. But it turned out to be one of those fortunate mistakesone of those fraught-with-peril enterprises that you might never have embarked on if you had known the consequenceslike being born, for instance. A story about the thrills and perils of renovating an old farm on a shoestring, a warm and wise book about living simply in the country while pursuing the writer's craft.