A story about the thrills and perils of renovating an old farm on a shoestring, a warm and wise book about living simply in the country while pursuing the writer's craft.



In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, Elliott Merrick and his wife bought a ramshackle farm on a Vermont hillside for $1,000. Merrick, a young writer with a healthy dose of idealism and a determination to live in the country, had just sold his first book to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner's. "I had an idea that I would be rich and famous henceforth," Merrick wrote, but added, "nothing could be farther from the truth . . . As I look back, I'm amazed that we could so blithely have crossed our great Rubicon on a spiderweb. But it turned out to be one of those fortunate mistakes—one of those fraught-with-peril enterprises that you might never have embarked on if you had known the consequences—like being born, for instance." Green Mountain Farm describes Merrick's and his family's often haphazard attempts to make a go of it on these stony, wintry acres, in a house that was falling down around them. As Merrick puts it, "We did everything wrong, but it came out right." They were dirt poor, but through it all, believed wholeheartedly in going directly after the things they wanted most: to write and to farm, however they could. A lyrical, funny, richly fulfilling book about old houses, farming, writing, and the joys of country life, this book is as fresh today as when it was originally published more than fifty years ago.