Mildred Savage, the author of "Parrish," a tale of a teenager struggling into manhood in the vast tobacco fields of the Connecticut River Valley in the late 1940s and early '50s - a story later adapted for a popular movie of the same title - died Friday at her home in Norwich. She was 92.

Her death was confirmed by her daughter, Susan Savage Simpson.

Set in the days when much of the shade-grown tobacco used for wrapping cigars came from central Connecticut, "Parrish" tells the story of how 18-year-old Parrish MacLean works his way out of the fields. He must deal with Judd Raike, a brutal, predatory landowner who wants to gobble up all the tobacco farms in the valley.

In the 1961 movie, Parrish was played by the blond, wavy-haired heartthrob Troy Donahue; his mother by Claudette Colbert; and the ruthless Judd Raike by Karl Malden.

"This tightly controlled first novel by Mildred Savage is an impressive debut," Edmund Fuller wrote in The New York Times when "Parrish" was published in 1958. "Here is a new, young writer whose style and approach suggest that she has sprung, full-panoplied, from the brow of Edna Ferber." Mr. Fuller likened the book to Ferber's "Giant," a withering satire of Texas's nouveau riche that was also adapted for the big screen.

In another novel, "In Vivo" (1964), Savage detailed the intricacies and behind-the-scenes drama of research at a fictional pharmaceutical company as scientists seek to create an antibiotic far more powerful than penicillin. She turned to nonfiction in 1970 with "A Great Fall: A Murder and Its Consequences." Recounting the vicious killing of a young housewife in Litchfield County, in 1965, the book also delved into broader issues like the rules governing police interrogation and the sometimes conflicting interests of a fair trial and freedom of the press. Neither of two suspects, the victim's mentally ill mother-in-law and a love-crazed young man who lived nearby, was convicted.

"A Great Fall" won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for best "fact crime" book in 1971.

Mildred Spitz Savage was born in New London, on June 26, 1919, one of three children of Ezekiel and Sadie Spitz. Besides her daughter, she is survived by a son, Michael, and two grandchildren. Her husband, Bernard, died in 2002. Bernard Savage was a prominent civic leader in Norwich and alumnus of Norwich Free Academy.

Savage did not at first intend to be a writer. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1941 with a degree in history. "She got married after college, and then I was born," her daughter said. "Writing was something she could do at home."

In a 2003 interview with The Day, Savage said, "Writing is what I do. It's life itself. I suppose there are bad days, but it would be very hard for me to imagine doing anything else."

That year, unable to get a major publishing house interested in "Cirie," a historical novel about the Russian Revolution, she published it herself.

"I can't tell you how many people have told me they learned what really went on in the Russian Revolution from reading 'Cirie.' I think it's a good book, but it hasn't been a very lucky book," she said in her interview with The Day.