 She was granted a Doctor of Philosophy in English in 1943.Her dissertation was a never-published novel, “Hell’s Holler,” dealing with the primitive conditions of her native Chariton River Valley and its tensions with the college of osteopathic medicine in nearby Kirksville, Missouri.The novel reflects in some measure her brief and unhappy marriage to an alcoholic artist, a match of which her family disapproved (her mother refused to attend the wedding) and which ended in divorce in the late 1940s.