Women's History Month titles: Loula Erdman began as a writer from Texas, but ended as a writer about Texas.

Celebrating Women's History Month, Henry Bemis Books is delighted to offer the breakout novel of an important mid-20thC Texas writer:

Loula Grace Erdman, The Years of the Locust (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1947) 234 pp. Hardcover, no dust jacket. Blue cloth boards with gold titling on the spine. Front cover features a lower-right corner debossed set of laurels around a book and the words, “Prize Novel.”

Deckled-edge text block with pp. 169-70 slightly protruding, and with two inside creases, from incorrect paper cutting. Slight browning to the block edges. 8” x 5.5”. Good condition. HBB price: $15.

The Years of the Locust was Erdman’s third novel, and first adult work. It achieved spectacular success, winning the biennial Dodd, Mead-Redbook $10,000 prize in 1947. It is the story of how the death of Dade Kenzie, the wise, influential patriarch of a Missouri farming family, affects his family and acquaintances. The story is told through flashbacks in the minds of seven individuals whose lives were profoundly influenced by Kenzie. The action covers just three days-  the time slightly before Dade's death until after his funeral.

In Texas Women Writers: A Tradition of Their Own, Sylvia Grider assess the book:

The Years of the Locust demonstrated she had extraordinary abilities for structuring plot, characterizing her people, and providing details of time and place whose accuracy inspired her readers’ confidence. This work, meritorious for the flashback technique that allowed her to develop the separate points of view of five different women attending the funeral of the family’s patriarch, won the $10,000 Dodd Mead-Redbook award...The tenets she formulated and advanced in this book would recur in all of her writing: acceptance of challenge; faith in one’s individuality; the pertinacity to endure; the courage to hold on to dreams; and the hard core of integrity that brings rewards in family ties and in the community.

An autobiographical novelist who drew on her childhood and life as a teacher in her early works, Erdman struck out, reluctantly, in a new direction with her next book, 1950’s The Edge of Time. Pressed by her editor, she tackled historical fiction and the settlement of the Texas Panhandle, to great acclaim and six later novels set in the region- all told from the point of view of the women whose stories had so long gone unsung. She even came to enjoy the support of the male Texas fiction establishment led by J.Frank Dobie, and praise from former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

The Texas State Historical Association remembers her online to this day:

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. She attended Polk Street Methodist Church in Amarillo and died in that city on June 20, 1976.

Erdman’s papers are at West Texas A&M University.