The Friendly Persuasion

The Friendly Persuasion is an American novel published in 1945 by Jessamyn West. It was adapted as the Oscar-nominated motion picture Friendly Persuasion in 1956. The book consists of 14 vignettes about a Quaker farming family, the Birdwells, living near the town of Vernon in southern Indiana along "the banks of the Muscatatuck, where once the woods stretched, dark row on row." The Birdwells' farm, Maple Grove Nursery, was handed down to them by pioneering forebears who came west nearly fifty years before the time period depicted at the outset of the novel.

West published the vignettes between 1940 and 1945 as individual stories in Prairie Schooner, Collier's, Harper's Bazaar, The Atlantic Monthly, Ladies' Home Journal, New Mexico Quarterly, and Harper's Magazine. She then had them reprinted for The Friendly Persuasion in more or less chronological order covering a forty-year span of the Birdwell family in the latter half of the 19th Century.

West gained the background material for the stories while recuperating at home from a nearly fatal bout with tuberculosis in the early 1930s. Having gone home to die, she improbably recovered. During her convalescence, her mother, Grace Milhous West, shared with her many childhood memories of growing up as a Quaker girl in southern Indiana, and particularly of grandparents Joshua and Elizabeth Milhous, who became the models for the Birdwells. At the time of her illness, West had quit teaching to write, initially without success. The enforced inactivity of her recovery resulted in a prolific output of short stories. In 1969, she published a companion novel, Except for Me and Thee, whose stories filled in the history of the Birdwells, including how they courted, married, and moved to Indiana.