I had foot surgery a few weeks ago, and have been catching up on photo albums, reading, and family history projects. Michael found a great software package (Cute PDF) that lets you scan in a muliple page document as all one PDF. So I have been using it to archive some of my mother's old stories about the family. Then I found out that Barbara has been given permission for us to post Suckow's Country People, and she and I have been working on that project.
If you have not read it, Country People is a very special book. Answers.com describes the book as follows: "Country People. After being encouraged by H. L. Mencken, who helped publish her work in Smart Set and American Mercury, the Iowa native publishes her first novel, a realistic study of three generations of a German American family. Avoiding striking incidents, the novel is a restrained, documentary-like narrative that shows the writer's characteristic strengths of local color and psychological characterization."
(http://www.answers.com/topic/ruth-suckow)
As I have noted in other postings, I use one of Suckow's short stories in my Introduction to Literature class, and am always pleased to see that the majority of my students can identify with Suckow's characters and descriptions of small town life. This book includes many of the themes that Suckow is so well known for, with her depiction of life on the farm in the early part of the 1900s, the differences between the generations as children leave the farm and move to town, and the impact of the first World War on these German American farmers.
