The Rolling Years

A saga of three generations of Scottish-American Presbyterians. After the Civil War, Daniel and Sarah McDowell, the first generation, beget 12 children. Daniel is a dour Calvinistic husband; Sarah is bitter about her repeated pregnancies. Their son David moves to Pittsburgh, where he becomes a judge. Daughter Jeannie marries a local schoolteacher. Her daughter Connie is the protagonist of the book's third section and she too remains in the Westmoreland County Scottish Presbyterian community. The novel dramatizes change in Western Pennsylvania: how the strict Calvinism of the Scottish immigrants weakens; the shifting roles of wives and husbands; and how industrial development shrinks the land and rural life.

The author was born Agnes Sligh (1888-1982) in New Alexandria, Westmoreland County to a Scottish immigrant and his Scottish-American wife. She attended the village school and in 1910 graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Indiana Normal School. She taught high school until 1918 when she married an Englishman, James Lyall Turnbull. The couple left Western Pennsylvania in 1922 for Maplewood, New Jersey, where Agnes lived for 60 years as a fiction writer. She is buried in New Alexandria.