| Ruth Suckow (1892-1960) is one of a small group of Iowa authors of short stories and novels whose work attracted the attention of major reviewers, literary historians, and critics. Her reputation is based on eight novels, three short novels, five collections of short stories, some stories published only in magazines, and several critical essays, all published between 1920 and 1960. A number of her short stories and one short novel have been reprinted in two recent volumes. In many of these her subjects are "the sparrows of Iowa" "ordinary" Iowans from farms and small towns, the people Ruth Suckow would have seen or known as she grew up in Hawarden and other Iowa towns where her father, a descendant of German immigrants, served as a minister, the people she made "extra-ordinary" by writing about them. |
| In her first novel, Country People (1924), Suckow used "folk life" as the basis for her tale of three generations of a closely related immigrant German farm family. But in later work her subjects became "folks," working-class and middle-class people on farms and in small towns and cities. In "The Folk Idea in American Life" (Scribner's Magazine, September 1930), Suckow noted the differences between these two groups and the reasons for the change in her literary philosophy. "Folk art'' or "folk life" was not the basis of American civilization, she said. The true basis was the "folks." "Folk life" was "the common existence, in its most basic terms, of a group of people knit firmly together by common ties usually the blood tie." "Folks," on the other hand, had a common "likeness... in fortune and aim rather than in blood.... In the term `folks,' as in the |
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IOWA CITY