![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The wound that Ben, Ellen’s father, receives during his military service in Russia leads him to meet Anna (his Russian nurse), but also plagues him for the rest of his days. The novel opens in the year leading up to the second World War, but the Great War (WWI) haunts the Webb family. Like so many coming of age stories, Ellen only truly understands her own story, which is so wrapped up in those of her parents’, when she leaves the place she has always known as home even in its absence the landscape of Montana plays an important role in Ellen’s psychology. ![]() Yet, from the opening paragraph of Walker’s powerful novel it is clear that the wind-swept prairie is an intimate part of Ellen’s story. As the only child of a Russian woman and a New England man it may seem strange that Ellen is born and raised on a dryland wheat farm in the middle of the Montana prairie. So much about Ellen Webb’s coming of age in Mildred Walker’s Winter Wheat (1944) is bound to the land of central Montana. ![]()
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