For Dear Life and Selected Short Stories

"I've often read books about people who grew up in the country, and have been amazed to find that they all seemed to have been great philosophers. They saw, and felt, a great deal more than I had time to see or think or feel. They seem to have responded poetically to clouds floating in a blue sky, and rhapsodized on the music of summer rain. I often wonder if they had to go two miles in musical summer rain to milk, and to carry the full pail carefully home without getting rain mixed with it, and then walk three miles through stiff clinging mud, to school. I know that often in the heat of noonday, leaning on a hoe, looking across valleys at the mountains, so blue, so close, my only conscious thought was, 'How can I ever get away from here?'"

Virginia Pruitt received her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia Howard J. Faulkner received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma. Both are professors in the Department of English at Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas