During these productive years, Walker also regularly wrote book reviews and short stories and clipped reviews of her own novels from the pages of the New York Times Book Review, the Saturday Review of Literature, and the Book of the Month Club Newsletter. The Body of a Young Man was nominated for the National Book Award in 1960. Her short novel, The Southwest Corner, was transformed in 1954 into a Broadway play and adapted to a Kraft television feature (Walker, Southwest Corner 4). Norton's Wife as their literary selection for January. In 1939, the Literary Guild of America had chosen Dr. Winter Wheat, published in 1944, was her most popular and lucrative novel, but it was by no means her only literary success. The subsequent success of Winter Wheat enabled the family to move from their bungalow in Great Falls to their acreage on the banks of the Missouri river. Walker married Ferdinand Schemm in 1927, and the success of Fireweed helped finance the young family's move from the Midwest to Montana. The success of this novel and its publication that year by Harcourt Brace initiated a partnership that Walker maintained for nearly half a century and eleven more novels, ending with the 1970 publication of If a Lion Could Talk. From Wells, she continued her education and literary career at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, receiving her Master's degree in English in 1933, along with the Avery Hopwood Award for her novel Fireweed. Walker entered Wells, a private women's college in New York, under a tuition waiver granted for ministers' daughters in 1922 she was very enthusiastic about this opportunity because she had had ambitions to become a writer since the age of seven.

Mildred Walker's prodigious literary career began when she was only twenty-one with the publication of an essay titled 'Gargoyles,' written during her senior year at Wells College, and would eventually culminate with the publication of thirteen novels.

Winter Wheat by Mildred Walker