Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of "The New Yorker" to Appear at Cook Park Library to Discuss Her Book "Nothing Daunted".

The New Yorker executive editor Dorothy Wickenden will discuss her book Nothing Daunted: The Unexpected Education of Two Society Girls in the West on Tuesday, May 29 at 7PM at the Cook Park Library in Libertyville. This non-fiction account of a year in the life of two close friends who embarked on a brief but life-changing adventure in the early 20th century; to the untamed West no less; is a story that only Wickenden can chronicle accurately. For you see, one of these women was her grandmother.

A few years ago, Wickenden discovered a collection of letters that her grandmother, Dorothy Woodruff, had written home to Auburn, New York, from the small community of Elkhead, Colorado, where she and her lifelong friend Rosamond Underwood had gone to teach for a year in 1916. Wickenden always thought of her grandmother's stories as nothing more than a colorful family history until she read the letters. "When I found her letters from Elkhead, I read them as an editor and a writer, and thought they gave me a new way to look at the settling of the West," said Wickenden in an article posted by Ian Crouch in The New Yorker. "It was full of characters who'd been overlooked in traditional history books, and it was a kind of Western I'd never read or seen before."

In the summer of 1916, Dorothy Woodruff and Rosamond Underwood, close friends from childhood and graduates of Smith College, left home in Auburn, New York, for the wilds of northwestern Colorado. Bored by their society luncheons, chaperoned balls, charity work, and not yet ready for marriage, they learned that two teaching jobs were available in a remote mountaintop schoolhouse on the Western Slope of Colorado. They traveled on the new railroad over the Continental Divide and by wagon to Elkhead, where they lived with the surprisingly well-educated Harrison family.

There the women improvised their way through teaching the children of struggling homesteaders. While devoted to their students, they were equally exasperated by them and also amazed at their own capacity to adapt. Later, both looked back on their year in Elkhead as the best time in their lives. That year transformed the children, their families, and the undaunted teachers themselves.

Wickenden set out on her own journey to discover what two gutsy Eastern women found when they went West and what shaped their futures. "I'd always wondered about the contradictions in my grandmother's character: there were remnants of her Victorian upbringing, but also a defiant independence," said Wickenden in The New Yorker article. "When she came to visit, she always talked about the "marvelous people" she had met in Colorado. They were mostly impoverished homesteaders in the mountains where she and Ros lived and taught, and they were unlike anyone they had ever met before. The two teachers were changed forever by their experience."

Drawing upon the letters, interviews with descendents, research about these vanished communities, and trips to the region, Wickenden creates a compelling, original saga about these teachers and the "settling up" of the West. Join Wickenden as she tells the story of her discovery. This free event is open to the public but registration is required. To register, call (847) 362-2330 or go to webres.cooklib.org. Books for signing will be available to purchase courtesy of Lake Forest Bookstore.

Dorothy Wickenden has been the executive editor of The New Yorker since January 1996. She also writes for the magazine and is the moderator of its weekly podcast "The Political Scene." She is on the faculty of The Writers' Institute at CUNY's Graduate Center, where she teaches a course on narrative nonfiction. A former Nieman Fellow at Harvard, Wickenden was national affairs editor at Newsweek from 1993-1995 and before that was the longtime executive editor at The New Republic. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Westchester, New York.