#Butternut wisdom gladys taber series#
#Butternut wisdom gladys taber free#

#Butternut wisdom gladys taber free#

In the book's first section, I flagged this sentence: 'As we celebrate this year, we must resolve to keep our lives free from racial intolerance, from bigotry and hate. To me, many of Taber's comments seem prescient. The Book of Stillmeadow was published in 1948, and some of its essays appeared in print eleven years before that. She confides in the reader, and I am ready to listen to her thoughtful observations and daily pleasures. Taber doesn't lose her sense of hope or humor, and she isn't pompous, either.

One of the many qualities about Taber that I appreciate is her ability to move easily from the small details of her pets, house, gardens, and daily activities outward to larger subjects of culture, land use, and literature and on further still to prejudice, aggression, fear, and hate, all within the space of a few pages. Not surprisingly, I plucked one off the shelf to read each night during this sad and scary period of life with COVID-19. I've read and re-read Gladys Taber's 'Stillmeadow' and 'Still Cove' books through the years, finding them calming during difficult times. She died on Main Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Massachusetts at the age of 80. Gladys Taber had divorced her husband in 1946 and he later passed away in October 1964. Her final book, published posthumously, was Still Cove Journal (Lippincott, 1981). While a resident of Orleans, Taber contributed “Still Cove Sketches” to the Cape Cod Oracle.

Having spent some summers on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, she decided to relocate to the town of Orleans where she would live out the remainder of her days. In 1960, her companion, Eleanor, died and Taber decided to abandon life at Stillmeadow. In 1959, she moved from Ladies’ Home Journal to Family Circle, contributing the “Butternut Wisdom” column until her retirement in 1967. She published more than 20 books related to Stillmeadow, including several cookbooks.

#Butternut wisdom gladys taber series#

Beginning with Harvest at Stillmeadow (Little, Brown, 1940), Taber wrote a series of books about her simple life in New England that possessed homespun wisdom dolled out with earthy humor and an appreciation for the small things. In the late 1930s, Taber joined the staff of the Ladies’ Home Journal and began to contribute the column “Diary of Domesticity.”īy this time, she had separated from her husband and was living at Stillmeadow, a farmhouse built in 1690 in Southbury, Connecticut, sharing the house with Eleanor Sanford Mayer, a childhood friend who was often mistakenly identified as her sister. She went on to write several other novels and short story collections, including Tomorrow May Be Fair ( Coward, 1935), A Star to Steer By (Macrae, 1938) and This Is for Always (Macrae, 1938). Taber won attention for her first humorous novel, Late Climbs the Sun (Coward, 1934). She began her literary career with a play, Lady of the Moon (Penn), in 1928, and followed with a book of verse, Lyonesse (Bozart) in 1929. Taber taught English at Lawrence College, Randolph Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and at Columbia University, where she did postgraduate studies. The following year, she married Frank Albion Taber, Jr., giving birth to their daughter on July 7, 1923. She returned to her hometown and earned a master’s in 1921 from Lawrence College, where her father was on faculty. Gladys graduated from Appleton High School and enrolled at Wellesley College, receiving her bachelor’s degree in 1920. During her childhood, she moved frequently as her father accepted various teaching posts until they finally settled in Appleton, Wisconsin. An older sister, Majel, had died at the age of six months while a younger brother Walter died at 15 months. Her parents were Rufus Mather Bagg, who could trace his ancestry back to Cotton Mather, and the former Grace Sibyl Raybold.

A prolific author whose output includes plays, essays, memoirs and fiction, Gladys Taber (1899 – 1980) is perhaps best recalled for a series of books and columns about her life at Stillmeadow, a 17th-century farmhouse in Southbury, Connecticut.īorn Gladys Bagg on Apin Colorado Springs, Colorado, she was the middle child and only one to survive to adulthood.