In 1934, in the depths of the Great Depression, Elliott Merrick and his wife bought a ramshackle farm on a Vermont hillside for $1000. Merrick, a young writer with a healthy dose of idealism and determination to live in the country, had just sold his first book to Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s. This book describes Merricks 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. They were poor, but through it all, believed wholeheartedly in going directly after the things they most wanted: to write and to farm, however they could.