The orchard children

Maddux, Rachel

Harper&Row

The dream of a green kingdom, a new world, a place to start over - this is the vision that compels the five central characters in this novel to seek a hidden land. The story is at once the age-old tale of utopia and dystopia and the saga of Americans at mid-century, with a history of economic depression, the midwestern dust bowl, and two world wars. First published in 1957, The Green Kingdom was Rachel Maddux's first novel, an ambitious undertaking that had occupied nearly twenty years of her life. Central to the novel is the act of creation - from naming the plants and animals of the kingdom to bearing children. Both Justin Magnus and Erma Herrick discover the wellsprings of their creative energy as they discover the kingdom and, finally, each other in a story that is by turns mystical and realistic, the product of a vivid imagination and keen powers of observation. The Green Kingdom itself is a metaphor for whatever circumstances can make a person feel some control over fate. To live in the Green Kingdom is to inhabit what Maddux calls "the climate of potentiality," and to read The Green Kingdom is an intense experience in which we imagine our own responses to this land that Maddux so carefully delineates.

Green Kingdom

Literature & Fiction

Avon/Books

AVON.

Negotiation is often thought of as a contest in which one side wins and the other side loses. The truth is that we negotiate every day with a view toward meeting our needs without antagonizing or defeating others.

Negotiation Basics: Win-Win Strategies for Everyone

Lickson, Charles P.

Maddux, Robert B.

Business & Money

Crisp Pub Inc

Communication Autobiography: Rachel Maddux Her Novella Turnips Blood

Biographies & Memoirs

Univ Tennessee Press

Known primarily for her novels--The Green Kingdom (1957), Abel's Daughter (1960), and A Walk in the Spring Rain (1966)--and her nonfiction work The Orchard Children (1977), Rachel Maddux was also a prolific writer of short fiction, leaving more than two dozen unpublished stories when she died in 1983. As Nancy A. Walker notes in her introduction to the present volume, anyone familiar with Maddux's previously published work will recognize these stories as the products of Maddux's imagination and experience.Maddux believed that her fiction depicted "the way things are" at a given place and time: the barter system used by small businesses during the Depression, the discomfort of a little girl meeting her first celebrity, the human drama that goes on in an unremarkable small town in Oklahoma. Her fiction often captures the particular flavor of everyday life during definable periods in twentieth-century America. "The House in the Woods," "Guaranteed," and "Change" evoke the World War II period from the perspective of the wives of servicemen, while "No Smoking, No Spitting," "The Little Woman," and "They're Laughing" afford glimpses of the lives of Depression-era workers. Yet these stories are not merely period pieces, nor are they in any sense nostalgic. Instead, they capture the precise moment in an effort to locate the fragile, yet crucial, quality of true human connectedness.Maddux defined the inspiration for her writing as "the re-capturing of one's own childhood," a period when "there is a continual teeter-totter of the real and the imaginary, the subconscious and the conscious mind." The strange, almost surreal element of many of these stories come from their origin in the intersection between the child-like imagination, in which anything is possible, and the skill of the mature writer who gives the imagination shape.Other books by Maddux to be published the University of Tennessee Press are A Walk in the Spring Rain, together with The Orchard Children; The Green Kingdom; and Abel's Daughter. Already published is her autobiography, Communication, with her novella, Turnip's Blood.

The Way Things Are: The Stories of Rachel Maddux

Univ of Tennessee Pr

The two works by Rachel Maddux reprinted in this volume could be called her "Tennessee" books. Both were written after Maddux and her husband, King Baker, moved to Houston County, Tennessee, in 1960, and both draw upon her experiences with and perceptions of life there in the 1960s and 1970s. A Walk in the Spring Rain is a novel, and The Orchard Children is nonfiction, but both books deal with discovery, love, and loss - themes that transcend a specific place. A Walk in the Spring Rain, first published in 1966 by Doubleday, was reissued in paperback by Avon in 1978. A film version of the novel, starring Ingrid Bergman and Anthony Quinn, premiered in 1970, and the novel was included in the book Fiction into Film, published by the University of Tennessee Press later that year. What makes this short novel so compelling? It is a love story - the most popular theme in human narrative - affirming the power and possibility of human love, at any age and in any circumstances. Set in West Virginia, it owes much of its specific sense of locale to Maddux's own adjustment to rural life in Houston County. The Orchard Children, first published in 1977, is the account of Maddux and Baker's unsuccessful attempt to adopt two foster children. In emphasizing the importance of childhood, it has affinities with Maddux's only other autobiographical work, Communication, written in 1941 when she was twenty-eight and published in 1991 by the University of Tennessee Press. Just as one of the central themes of Communication is the need to take children seriously on their own terms - to pay attention to their requirements for honesty and affection - so the message of The Orchard Children is that the legal system, which determines who will raise abused or abandoned children, seems often to ignore the best interests of the children themselves. Maddux's universalizing of her story resulted, as with A Walk in the Spring Rain, in a wider audience for The Orchard Children. The book inspired a CBS television documentary, titled "Who Will Save the Children?" and starring Shirley Jones and Len Cariou, which aired in December of 1978.

A Walk Spring Rain: And The Orchard Children (Rachel Maddux Series, Vol 3)

United States

The Green Kingdom (The Rachel Maddux Series, Vol 4)

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