Biography
Martha Ostenso was a Norwegian-born American author, screenwriter, poet and teacher, who with her parents, Sigurd and Olina (née Tungeland) Ostenso, immigrated to United States around 1902. She was raised in small towns across North Dakota, Minnesota and Manitoba, Canada. While still a teenager she taught school in Manitoba before attending the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. Later she would attend writing classes at Columbia University and work as a social worker in Brooklyn before returning to Minnesota to teach and write.
Ostenso's first works to be published was a compilation of poems entitled "A Far Land" (1924). Her big breakthrough though, came the next year when she won the Dodd Mead First Novel Award along with its $13,500 prize for her submission of "Wild Geese" (originally titled "The Passionate Flight"). The book went on to earn her a very lucrative income in serial and film rights from the co-sponsors of the contest, Pictorial Review Magazine and the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation. As an added bonus, the young writer received hundreds of marriage proposals through the mail after the success of her book was reported by the media.
In 1944 Ostenso married her long-time companion, the Canadian writer Douglas Durkin. The couple had first met when she was a high school student in Brandon, Manitoba and he was a professor of English at Brandon College. Early on, Durkin saw her potential as a writer and became her mentor. He would later become her business manager and collaborate on almost every book she wrote, including "Wild Geese". They married after his first wife, whom he had been separated from for many years, passed away.
Martha Ostenso and her husband collaborated on a number of short stories and over a dozen novels over the the years. "O River, Remember", a novel that chronicled the lives of two immigrant families over several generations in Minnesota's Red River Valley, was given a Literary Guild choice award in 1943. Her stories were generally set in the areas she grew up in and tended to reflect her Norwegian values. The couple also authored "The Passionate Flight" (1925), "The Dark Dawn" (1926), "The Mad Carews" (1927), "The Young May Moon" (1929), "The Water's under the Earth" (1930), "Prologue to Love" (1932), "There's Always Another Year" (1933), "The White Reef" (1934), "The Stone Field" (1937), "The Mandrake Root" (1938), "Love Passed This Way" (1942),"The Sunset Tree" (1943) and "Milk Route" (1948).
Ostenso, who became an American citizen in 1931, lived and worked primarily on Gull Lake (near Brainerd, Minnesota) and in Hollywood, California, where she and Durkin became friends with such stars as Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Mary Pickford' and Henry Fonda. Several writers have credited Fonda with starring in a 1940 remake of "Wild Geese". He actually starred in Wild Geese Calling (1941), a film based on the novel by the same name by Stewart Edward White.
In 1963 Ostenso and Durkin retired to Seattle to be close to his two sons. She died there on 23 November, 1963 after a sudden illness.
