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. 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 mistakes―one of those fraught-with-peril enterprises that you might never have embarked on if you had known the consequences―like being born, for instance." Green Mountain Farm describes Merrick's and his family's often haphazard attempts to make a go of it on these stony, wintry acres, in a house that was falling down around them. As Merrick puts it, "We did everything wrong, but it came out right." They were dirt poor, but through it all, believed wholeheartedly in going directly after the things they wanted most: to write and to farm, however they could. A lyrical, funny, richly fulfilling book about old houses, farming, writing, and the joys of country life, this book is as fresh today as when it was originally published more than fifty years ago.

Green Mountain Farm

Biographies & Memoirs

Elliott Merrick

Arts & Literature

The Countryman Press

By turns lyrical, comic, and genuinely moving, Northern Nurse tells the story of Australian nurse Kate Austen and her adventures at Labrador's Grenfell Mission. Written by her husband, Elliott Merrick, it celebrates not only the unspoiled realm of the North, but also a woman's self-fulfillment there.

Northern Nurse

Community & Culture

Sherry Urie

True North

In 1929, at the age of 24, Elliott Merrick left his position as an advertising executive in New Jersey and headed up to Labrador to work as an unpaid volunteer for the Grenfell Mission. In 1933 he wrote True North about his experiences in the northern wilderness, living and working with trappers, Indians and with the nurse he met and married in a remote community. The book describes the hard work and severe conditions, along with the joy and friendship he and his wife experienced.

Travelers & Explorers

Heron Dance Art Studio

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Books by Elliott Merrick