Another Spring

by Loula Grace Erdman

Another Spring depicts the misery of dislocation visited upon thousands of Missourians in 1863 as a result of the infamous military Order Number Eleven.

... the military order was posted in four western counties of Missouri, banishing by federal edict all inhabitants, sympathizers of the Union as well as the Confederacy. Harried by roaming hostile bands, their homes burned, thousands fled the proscribed areas. Erdman's novel follows two families as they struggle to survive.

Genres: Historical

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1966

About the author

ERDMAN, LOULA GRACE (1898–1976). Loula Grace Erdman, writer, daughter of August F. and Mollie (Maddox) Erdman, was born on June 8, 1898, near Alma, Lafayette County, Missouri. She attended Central Missouri State College (B.S., 1931) and Columbia University (M.A., 1941). She also studied at the University of Wisconsin, the University of Southern California, and West Texas State College. She subsequently moved to Texas and taught in the Amarillo public schools and at West Texas State College, where she eventually became novelist-in-residence and director of the Advanced Workshop in Creative Writing.

Erdman began writing in the 1930s, and by 1946 about fifty of her short stories and magazine articles had been published, as well as her first juvenile novel, Separate Star (1944), a book about career teaching. In 1946 she won the $10,000 Dodd, Mead-Redbook Award for The Years of the Locust (1947), a novel set in her native Missouri. In 1952 she received the American Girl-Dodd, Mead Award for The Wind Blows Free (1952), the first volume of a juvenile trilogy about a pioneer Panhandle family. She continued the story of the Pierce family in The Wide Horizon (1956) and The Good Land (1959). Room to Grow (1962), a novel about French immigrants who moved to the Panhandle via New Orleans, won her the Texas Institute of Letters Juvenile Award. She received both the Texas Institute of Letters Award and the Steck-Vaughn Award for A Bluebird Will Do (1973). Her other works include A Wonderful Thing and Other Stories (1940), Fair Is the Morning (1945), Lonely Passage (1948), The Edge of Time (1950), Three at the Wedding (1953), My Sky Is Blue (1953), The Far Journey (1955), Short Summer (1958), Many a Voyage (1960), The Man Who Told the Truth (1962), Life Was Simpler Then (1963), Another Spring (1966), Bright Sky (1969), A Time to Write (1969), and Save Weeping for the Night (1975).

Miss Erdman was a member of the Texas Institute of Letters, the Panhandle Penwomen, Delta Kappa Gamma, Kappa Delta Pi, and Phi Kappa Phi. As a career teacher who never considered abandoning teaching even after she gained recognition as a writer, she also belonged to the National Education Association and the Texas State Teachers Association.

Reviews

[Sheri South · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've loved this book ever since I first found it in my high school library. It features a sweet, understated romance with one of my favorite tropes, both for reading and writing, the one in which the heroine is of a higher social class than the hero. (Hmm, I never thought about it before, but I wonder now to what extent my reading this book as a teenager formed my preferences decades later, when I began writing.) It also taught me about a little-known aspect of the Civil War which I, growing up in Alabama, had never heard of: the bitter and often violent conflict between Confederate-leaning Missouri and neighboring Union-supporting Kansas.

One word of caution: Since this book was first published in 1966, it contains the "n-word" in the same context I knew it a century later--disrespectful, certainly, perhaps even insulting, but not the profanity it is considered today. But at the same time, this lack of political correctness results in a richer reading experience: all races and social classes are capable of both bravery and cowardice, betrayal and heroism. And all understand themselves, and each other, better by the end of the book.

Here's an item my fellow bibliophiles may find interesting. A few years ago, I remembered this book from my high school years and decided to track down a copy. I looked at Bookfinder.com and found a dustjacketed hardcover in very good condition at a reasonable price, so I ordered it. When it arrived, I opened it up, and found this inscription: For Helen McIntyre--Best wishes to a fellow Missourian. Loula Grace Erdman, Albuquerque, New Mexico, March 7, 1967." There had been no mention of the book's being autographed by the author, who died in 1976. What a nice surprise!

[Pam Dick · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very interesting book about the civil war time period. It dealt with Order Number 11 which forced citizens to move because they were thought to be helping the confederacy.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by Loula Grace Erdman vividly portrays something not well known about the Civil War - Order Number 11, which forced people from three counties in Missouri to leave their homes and get out, with very little warning. It has to do with the politics of all the disturbances between the Kansas and Missouri borders. Anarchy was the story of the day. This piece of fiction brings the conflict down to the personal level and makes the reader really see how awful that time was. Erdman's gift of characterization is on point as usual.