Literature of Place: Dwelling on the Land before Earth Day

The heartland family farm chapter considers Hamlin Garland's Boy Life on the Prairie and Main-Travelled Roads, the saga of the Richard Lloyd-Jones family as revealed in Maginel Wright Barney's The Valley of the God-Almighty Joneses (1965), and Mary Ellen Chase's A Goodly Fellowship (1939) describing the Hillside Home School directed by Ellen and Jane Lloyd-Jones. Simo follows Johnson with a discussion of Rachel Peden, the Indiana farm author of Rural Free (1961) and The Land, the People (1966) in which shared love of the land is the dominant theme and recurrent issues include "possession, ownership, boundaries, waves of invasion, and degrees of a farmer's independence" (114).