Martha
Ostenso (17 September
1900 – 24 November 1963) was a Norwegian American novelist and screenwriter. Martha Ostenso was born in
Haukeland (now part of Bergen), in Hordaland County, Norway. Her parents were Sigurd and
Olina (née Tungeland) Ostenso. She emigrated with her family. She first settled
in the province of Manitoba,
Canada, before moving to South Dakota and Minnesota. Ostenso taught in a rural school and attended
the University of Manitoba for
approximately one year; she never graduated. While studying at the University of Manitoba,
she was a student of Douglas Durkin, a
professor in the English Department. Shortly thereafter Durkin left his wife
and children and moved to New York City; Ostenso joined him there. They lived
together in New York, where she studied at Columbia University. Martha Ostenso
worked as a social worker in New York; she and Durkin were active in the
literary circles of the time. Ostenso's best-known novel, Wild Geese, was
published in 1925. A book, about a young schoolteacher sent to teach in rural
Manitoba, was hailed by critics, including in analysis by Faye Hammill, as a landmark in Canadian realism; it won the
1925 Dodd, Mead and Company Best Novel of the Year Award.[4] It made her a well-known and best-selling
author. A film version of Wild Geese was made in 1927.Ostenso
and Durking later moved to Minnesota. Many of her novels were based on
Minnesota farm life; most incorporate elements of romance and melodrama.
Ostenso portrays the lives of rural immigrants with dignity. Although none of her later novels ever reached
the acclaim Wild Geese attracted, most continued to explore a
similar theme: the relationship between men and women and the land they work. A
number of her other works were translated and have been reprinted several
times.
In 1931, Ostenso acquired American citizenship. She continued to publish short stories, novels
and wrote a number of screenplays. Although it is now known that Ostenso
collaborated with Durkin, all their writing appeared under her name alone. She
produced fifteen more novels, the most successful of which was O River,
Remember, a novel about a family in the Red River Valley of Minnesota which won a Literary Guild selection in 1943.
Asked how to pronounce her name, she told The Literary Digest, "Of the three syllables in Ostenso,
the first receives the major accent, the second is without accent, the third
receives a minor accent. The final result is as if you spoke the name Austin and
added so as an afterthought." After
Durkin's wife died, he and Ostenso married in 1945. Martha Ostenso and Durkin
lived for a time in Hollywood, California, where they had friends among the
movie stars of the 1930s and 40s. Ostenso's novel Wild Geese was
filmed as The Cry of the Wild Geese in
1961 as a West-German and Austrian co-production and later as After the
Harvest in 2001 as a made-for-television movie for Canadian TV
starring Sam Shepard.