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The Inland Ground

The Inland Ground

An Evocation of the American Middle West
Revised Edition

by Richard Rhodes

Sales Date: November 25, 1991

344 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in

Paperback
9780700604999
Published: November 1991

$29.95

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Description
Authors
Praise
Table of Contents

The Inland Ground is Richard Rhodes’s first book. It was published quietly in 1970 to critical acclaim (The New York Times Book Review named it one of the best books of the year) but few sales. In the two decades that followed, Rhodes published ten more books, including A Hole in the World, Farm, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb, for which he won the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize.

Yet, Rhodes contends, some of his best writing is collected here, in The Inland Ground, sixteen essays that evoke the Middle West, on topics that range from coyote hunting to the Mayo Clinic. For this updated edition Rhodes has chosen the twelve best of his early pieces, combined them with four new essays, and added a spare, forceful preface.

Richard Rhodes is author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer, A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood, and The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb.

"Very early on you are convinced that the author is in love with the land he is writing about, and that he is a real writer. The mysteries of this Inland Ground are teasingly hinted at and sometimes brilliantly illuminated (as in poetically rendered essays on hog-butchering, on wheat-growing, on the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa). Mr. Rhodes has the skill and the love of language as well as of the land to bring it to our attention and our understanding."—New York Times Book Review
"Richard Rhodes’ Middle West is a sweep of the American earth from the St. Louis arch to the eastern border of Colorado. On the subjects of wheat, coyote hunting, hog butchering, Truman, and Eisenhower, Rhodes is poetic."—Indiana Magazine of History
"A very American book, written with a warm and compelling intelligence."—Harper’s Magazine
"A mosaic of chapters which trace, explore, examine with mature objectivity, but above all celebrate the essential spirit and virtues of the ‘freedom’ of the prairies. An exceptional book."—Publishers Weekly

Preface

1. The Inland Ground: An Introduction

2. Some Forebears

-Thomas Jefferson

-Josiah Gregg

-Henry Chatillon

-William Hornaday’s Wonders

-Millie

3. The Farther Continent of James Clyman

4. Fulton, Missouri: Signs and Wonders

5. How I Rode With Harold Lewis on a Diesel Freight Train Down to Gridley, Kansas, and Back

6. Harry’s Last Hurrah

7. Behold, How Good and Pleasant it is for Brethren to Dwell Together in Unity

8. Death All Day

9. Cupcake Land

10. Wheat

11. An Artist in Iron

12. Watching the Animals

13. A Scientific Cooperation for the Welfare of the Sick

14. A Friend’s Suicide

15. An Excursion on the Prairie

16. The Community of True Inspiration

Index

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The Inland Ground

An Evocation of the American Middle West
Revised Edition

The Inland Ground

An Evocation of the American Middle WestRevised Edition

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An Evocation of the American Middle West
Revised Edition