In August 1926, the Bread Loaf Writers'' Conference was founded in the heart of Vermont's Green Mountains on a secluded upland plateau. Ever since, it has remained the oldest, largest, and most influential of the scores of writers' conferences around the country.

This annual conference, held in an old Victorian summer resort and sponsored by Middlebury College, has attracted some of the most notable American literary names of the twentieth century, including Robert Frost ("godfather of Bread Loaf"), Ralph Ellison, Truman Capote, Sinclair Lewis, Carson McCullers, Anne Sexton, John Gardner, Eudora Welty, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Wallace Stegner, William Gass, Richard Wright, May Sarton, Archibald Macleish, James T. Farrell, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur, Maxine Kumin, and Stanley Elkin. It has nourished the careers of scores of promising young writers, many of whom went on to great literary prominence. At Bread Loaf, the friendships, the artistic and professional alliances, and the disputes and jealousies, have left their stamp upon those in attendance and, inevitably, upon the writing they created.

In a comprehensive, scrupulously researched, and lively historical narrative, "Group Portrait," David Haward Bain traces not just the richly anecdotal story of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, but also sets the annual sessions into their literary, social, and political contexts. Thus, Bread Loaf becomes a convenient prominence from which to view the course of American letters over seven decades. Moreover, by examining the lives of a number of individual writers -- both celebrated and obscure -- the narrative illuminates on a personal level what the notion of community is for writers: how writers discover themselves, define their work, and, finally, encounter each other. Those stages of sustainment are scrutinized and celebrated, at once demystifying the creative process and giving new inspiration to writes and lovers of literature everywhere.

The richly-illustrated second half of Whose Woods These Are (edited by Bain and artist/curator Mary Smyth Duffy) can be likened to a documentary film: it juxtaposes some 380 rare photographs, most of them never previously published, with the actual first-person words of participants -- painstakingly culled from diaries, memoirs, letters, and biographies, or contributed expressly for this book. These delightful anecdotal texts provide a fascinating inside look at celebrated writers at work and at play, allowing them to express themselves (about their lives, work, loves, and even hates). By turns witty, irreverent, and inspirational, together these voices produce an unforgettable chorus celebrating our national literature and those who produce it.

"Bread Loaf was, in a curious way, my Paris and my Rome. It was there that I met Frost, DeVoto, and many other writers who later became important in my life, and that summer visit...in 1938 led me directly to an appointment at Harvard and the chance to grow."

-- Wallace Stegner, 1992