Province of Manitoba » Culture Heritage, Tourism and Sport » Historic Resources » People, Places and Events » Manitobans Who Made a Difference » Difference Makers » Martha Ostenso

Manitobans Who Made a Difference

(Courtesy of "Winnipeg Tribune" Collection University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections)

At various times in her career a teacher, newspaper reporter, and social worker, Martha Ostenso was much better known as a novelist and Hollywood film scriptwriter. Today she is heralded as one of the founders of the school of "Prairie realism" in literature, providing a vivid and sensual exploration of the natural world through her own experiences on the Manitoban frontier. Ostenso was born near Bergen, Norway, and immigrated with her family to the midwestern United States in 1902. She and her family eventually settled in Brandon, where Ostenso attended Brandon Collegiate. Her family then moved to Winnipeg where she completed her high school education at Kelvin Technical High School. After graduation, Ostenso taught school in Hayland, in the Interlake region of Manitoba, and then obtained a job briefly as a reporter for the Manitoba Free Press. When Ostenso was twenty-two, however, she returned to her studies, attending the University of Manitoba, where she met Douglas Durkin, a professor of English and novelist (The Heart of Cherry McBain; The Lobstick Trail: A Romance of Northern Manitoba; and The Magpie).

After becoming romantically involved with Durkin, Ostenso followed him to New York City in the early 1920s when he accepted a teaching position at Columbia University. She studied the novel with Durkin at Columbia, and did social work in Brooklyn for several years, before moving to Minnesota with Durkin in 1931. In 1924, the year she published a volume of poetry, In a Far Land, Ostenso entered a nation-wide competition, sponsored by The Pictorial Review, the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, and the Dodd, Mead Publishing Company, for best first novel. With Durkin's help, she submitted a manuscript, "The Passionate Flight", which drew upon her prairie experiences teaching in Hayland and featured a patriarchal father and inter-generational conflict. A compelling romance, the story realistically explored the unity between man and nature, and the spareness of both physical and spiritual life in a pioneering farm community. Ostenso won the first prize of $13,500, beating out 1,700 other entries. The manuscript was published as the novel Wild Geese. Ostenso's only novel set in Canada, and her major achievement, was made into a silent movie and eventually turned into a Hollywood movie, starring Henry Fonda.

During the 1930s, Ostenso and Durkin continued to work, co-writing novels and earning between $30,000-40,000 per year on royalties alone. This wealth helped them to purchase a number of luxury cars, boats, and homes in Beverly Hills, New York, and the lake country of Minnesota. At their home in Brainerd, Minnesota, they entertained guests such as Fonda, Douglas Fairbanks, John Barrymore, and Mary Pickford. In Beverly Hills, they wrote film scripts for Hollywood movies. Ostenso's solo novels, none of which achieved the power and insight of Wild Geese, included: The Dark Dawn (1926), The Mad Carews (1927), The Waters Under the Earth (1930), Prologue to Love (1932), Milk Route (1948), The Sunset Tree (1949), and A Man had Tall Sons (1958). A novel about a family in the Minnesota Red River Valley, O River, Remember! (1943), was a Literary Guild choice in 1943.

Ostenso and Durkin were married in 1944, following the death of his first wife, but by the late 1940s a self-indulgent lifestyle began to affect their work. They retired to Seattle, Washington, in 1963. Tragically, Ostenso eventually surrendered to a life of alcoholism, and died of cirrhosis of the liver.