Elizabeth Letts

On 8 November 1954 a sixty-three-year-old farmer from Minot, Maine, named Mesannie Wilkins saddled a horse called Tarzan and set off for the Pacific with her dog, Depeche Toi. She had mortgaged the house and a doctor had told her she had little time left. She reached California. The Ride of Her Life, published in 2021, retraces that journey and the strangers who fed and sheltered her along the way. Elizabeth Letts writes true stories in which a horse carries the plot. The Perfect Horse follows the improvised American and German operation that brought the Lipizzaner breeding stock and other valuable horses out of a stud farm at Hostau, in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, in the spring of 1945; it won the 2017 PEN USA award for research non-fiction. Letts grew up riding three-day events in Southern California, read history at Yale, taught English in Morocco for three years with the Peace Corps, and trained afterwards as a certified nurse-midwife.