Walter "Wat" Dumaux Edmonds (July 15, 1903 – January 24 1998) was an American author noted for his historical novels, including the popular Drums Along the Mohawk (1936), which was made into a movie. Walter was born in Boonville, New York, and began a longtime association with Harvard University when he entered Choate Rosemary Hall in 1919. Originally intending to study chemical engineering, he became more interested in writing and worked as managing editor of the Literary Magazine, then edited The Advocate. He received an A.B. in 1926. In 1929, he published his first novel, Rome Haul, a work about the Erie Canal. The novel was adapted for the 1934 play The Farmer Takes a Wife and the 1935 film of the same name. He married Eleanor Stetson in 1930. Drums Along the Mohawk was on the bestseller list for two years, second only to Margaret Mitchell's famous 1936 novel Gone with the Wind for part of that time. Bert Breen's Barn was a winner of the 1975 National book award, a book which he had authored in 1996. Edmonds eventually published 34 books, many for children, as well as a number of magazine stories. He won the Newbery Medal in 1942, for The Matchlock Gun, and the National Book Award for Children's Literature in 1976, for Bert Breen's Barn. When Eleanor died in 1956, Walter remarried, to Katherine Howe Baker Carr, who died in 1989. Walter Edmonds died in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1998.
