Margaret Craven

From Gertrude Stein to the Movies: I Heard the Owl Call My Name

CWC member Margaret Craven, born in 1901 in Montana and reared in Puget Sound, attended Stanford University, where she majored in history, avoiding English despite her interest in writing.
Upon graduation, she moved to San Jose, where she took a job as secretary to the managing editor of the Mercury Herald. Soon she found herself writing editorials. After the editor's death, Margaret moved to Palo Alto and began writing short stories for magazines such as The Delineator. When her father died, she moved to San Francisco. There she experienced one of the highlights of her writing career: a meeting with Gertrude Stein, arranged by Alice B. Toklas.
Due to a near loss of eyesight from a bus accident when she was a young adult, Craven limited her writing to short stories because she could write them in her mind and then transfer them to paper. Faced with the necessity of earning a living during the Depression and supporting her mother, Craven found a market for her stories in popular magazines such as Collier's, Ladies' Home Companion, and The Saturday Evening Post. The latter became her central avenue of revenue for almost two decades. One life-altering story written for the Post would be called "Indian Outpost."
Margaret and her mother moved to Sacramento in 1960. An eye operation improved her vision. In her new environment, she met regularly with CWC members Jean Giovannoni and Ethyl Bangert. They met in each other's homes to critique their manuscripts. Craven's numerous stories, published between 1930 and 1962, consistently carried a theme of triumph over adversity.
By now a journalist as well as a short story writer, Margaret arranged with the Columbia Coast Mission of the Anglican Church to visit native villages. She journeyed north by boat from Vancouver into the Queen Charlotte Straits of British Columbia in search of material. Her trip ended at the top of Kingcome Inlet, in a village of the Kwakiutl Indians. She stayed for weeks, listening, taking notes. What she learned transformed into the beloved novel "I Heard the Owl Call My Name."
The work became a best-seller. The CBS General Electric Theater adapted the novel into a television movie.
The American edition sold more than one million copies. Margaret also published Walk Gently This Good Earth (1977), Again Calls the Owl (1984), and an anthology of her stories, The Home Front Collected Stories by Margaret Craven (1981), published a year after her death.