It was on those evenings at the foot of her mother's bed, the lamplight glowing and flickering warmly around the room, that Calvert fell in love with stories. "I was stricken," she later said in an essay for
Something about the Author Autobiography Series (
SAAS). "I became hopelessly infected with the magic of words. I never recovered." This passion for stories eventually manifested itself in a series of award- winning novels written for the young adult audience.
Calvert's parents were only eighteen years old when they married. Wed during the height of the Great Depression, the couple struggled to make ends meet, and they were forced to live with a variety of relatives during their first months of marriage. In May of 1932, though, Calvert's father, Fred Freeman, came upon an abandoned miner's cabin during a casual hike past Big Timber Creek, an area in Montana's Little Belt mountain range. "The cabin, constructed nearly forty years before, was windowless; its puncheon floor had rotted away; rats and mice were its only inhabitants. The surrounding countryside, however, once the scene of gold-and-silver mining activity during the 1890s, was lively with wild game, and the nearby creeks were full of slim, silver trout," recalled Calvert in SATA.
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