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Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle
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About Reapers Of The Dust: A Prairie Chronicle
Product Description Lois Phillips Hudson is recognized as a major chronicler of America’s agricultural heartland during the grim years of the Great Depression. Reapers of the Dust, now reprinted for a new generation of readers, vividly evokes that difficult time. From Hudson’s childhood in North Dakota spring these unusual, moving stories of simple, joyful days, of continuing battles with hostile elements, and of a family’s new life as migrant workers on the West Coast. While drawn from her own experiences growing up in North Dakota and migrating west during the Dust Bowl Diaspora, these stories are beautifully imagined and exquisitely rendered. Hudson was well ahead of her time in the ways in which she blends reality and imagination and in so doing blurs the boundaries of each in ways that would become common practice among writers in the generations following her. Her characters seem so real precisely because they are so perfectly crafted. Hudson’s experience certainly colors their world and shapes their character but they come fully and vividly alive only through the power of her art. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Introduction by David Guterson Reapers of the Dust is memoir to the extent that it was received that way, and fiction to the extent that its author, Lois Hudson, declaimed. It is a work of literary collage in an era before literary collage had a name, a predecessor to it that has gone unrecognized for reasons bearing on its author’s life, even today, with tragic force. Readers with biographical data about Hudsonwho was born in North Dakota in 1927 and moved to Western Washington as a child of the Dustbowlwill likely see Reapers of the Dust as a memoir. For those without biographical touchstones, much, still, will point toward the real,” as in this from When the Fields Are Fresh and Green”: My first hazy memories of myself were set nearly two thousand miles from the place where my second, verifiable memories of myself began. My father’s business failed in 1931, and my family moved from Seattle back to a desolate half-section in North Dakota just before I was four years old. One needn’t have a biography of Hudson at hand to discern this as memoir, orworking from negationas non-fiction of some sort. Such first person exposition, shorn of fiction’s dress, defies a fiction reader’s expectations. Hudson also wielded in Reapers of the Dust a conspicuous formalityan essayist’s toneat loggerheads with fiction. It is where there are the fewest distinctions between men and women that there can be the most bitterness between them,” she wrote to begin Gopher Hunting.” That, tentatively, might signal a coming fictionin the manner of the happy and unhappy families at Anna Karenina’s outsetbut it’s followed by: If a woman’s major function in life is to contribute additional muscles and energy to her husband’s physical battle for survival, then her usefulness will be judged by the same criteria that determine the usefulness of males. Such habits of thinking result in constant comparisons, usually to the disadvantage of females, so that women are seldom allotted any niche to dominate. Compare this to what follows the Tolstoyan abstraction: Everything was in confusion in the Oblonsky household. The wife had found out that the husband had had an affair with the French governess and had told him that she could not go on living in the same house with him. _______________ Reapers of the Dust debuted in 1965, three years after Hudson’s The Bones of Plenty, which is unambiguously a work of fiction, recognizably a novel in form, and, despite its obscurity, a consummate work of American Realism. Set in North Dakota in 1933 and 34, in a farm milieu of Dustbowl decline, Hudson’s novel appeared just before Pynchon’s V, Hawkes’ Second Skin, and Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradlein other words, late, though not just in literary terms. The Dustbowl, by the early Sixties, had dropped out of view.
