Jean Rikhoff

Jean Marie Rikhoff (May 28, 1926 – June 19, 2018) was an American author and editor. She is best known for writing two trilogies: the Timble Trilogy, made up of Dear Ones All, Voyage In, Voyage Out, and Rites of Passage, and the trilogy of the North Country, consisting of Buttes Landing, One of the Raymonds, and The Sweetwater.

Rikhoff received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a Eugene Saxton fellowship in creative writing (1958), and two State University of New York creative writing fellowships. Two of her books were selected as book of the month alternates and her autobiography was selected Best Memoir of 2011 by the Adirondack Center for Writing.

Life and work Jean Rikhoff was born in Chicago, Illinois, and grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana. She received her B.A. in English from Mount Holyoke College in 1948 and completed graduate work in English and philosophy at Wesleyan University. In Quixote she wrote an annual report called "Troubles of a Small Magazine". The collected reports were published by Grosset & Dunlap as the Quixote Anthology, along with selected works from the magazine.

In the meantime, she had started to work with literary agent Barthold Fles, who was of great support to her creative writing. Rikhoff remarried and spent 20 years on a horse farm in West Hebron, where she wrote some of her best known books. In 1983 she co-founded the Loft Press in Glens Falls, for which she served as publisher and editor of the Glens Falls Review. Among others, she served as faculty advisor to Expressions, the literary magazine of the Adirondack students.