Iowa's Forgotten Literary Legacy: Ruth Suckow and "A Rural Community"

Post date: Apr 21, 2017 4:16:02 PM

Iowa's Forgotten Literary Legacy: Ruth Suckow and "A Rural Community"

Ruth Suckow's grave, Greenwood cemetery, Cedar Falls

I have been pondering the irony that in spite of growing up in Iowa, becoming an English major, going to graduate school at Iowa State for a Master's degree in Comp and Rhetoric that included a LOT of literature, and then becoming a Community College English teacher, that I had NEVER heard of Ruth Suckow before 1999 or so, when my then boyfriend Mike took me on a "hot date" to the Annual Suckow meeting in Earlville, Iowa. On the way there, I sat in the back of a friend's van reading short stories that were like a time machine, letting me see the Iowa of the early 1900s. Ruth Suckow died when I was 7 years old, but reading her stories gives me a glimpse of the Iowa that my mother, grandmother and great grandmother knew.

Who IS Ruth Suckow? She was a realist, a regionalist (in spite of resisting that label), and a feminist. Ruth grew up as the daughter of a Congregational minister who moved around a lot, and that childhood pattern seemed to imprint itself on her: I call her an itinerant writer because she and husband Ferner Nuhn did a lot of traveling in their marriage, living in New Mexico, Washington, D. C., and spending a summer with poet Robert Frost. I recently wrote a chapter about her for a book ("The Realistic Regionalism of Iowa’s Ruth Suckow" by Cherie Dargan) about the forgotten Midwestern writers, The Midwestern Moment, edited by Jon Lauck (Hastings College Press, 2017) and here is how I introduced her:

"Ruth Suckow (1892-1960) was an itinerant writer and realistic regionalist whose description of the people, small towns, and farms of Iowa was based on her keen observation of life in the early 1900s. Suckow’s portrayal of the lives of ordinary “folks” enables modern readers to empathize with her characters, many of whom were Midwesterners. Her poetic descriptions of the Iowa farmland evoke the artistic realism of Grant Wood paintings and place her squarely in the Midwestern regionalist milieu of the interwar years. Suckow was recognized during her lifetime as a gifted writer and she was widely anthologized from the 1920s through the 1950s.[i] Suckow’s nearly fifty short stories include “Midwestern Primitive,” “A Rural Community,” and “A Start in Life.” The latter focused on a young teen's first day as a hired girl and became Suckow’s most widely-anthologized story. Her nine novels include Country People (1924) and the best-selling The Folks (1934). Suckow’s prose was so descriptive that Allan Nevins called her “a painter of Iowa” in his review of The Bonney Family (1928) and he called her short stories “among the most authentic and veracious of all records of middle western life.”[ii] Even Smart Set editor H. L. Mencken said Suckow was "unquestionably the most remarkable woman . . . writing stories in the republic."[iii]

[i] Margaret Stewart Omrcanin, Ruth Suckow: A Critical Study of Her Fiction. Appendix II : “A Chronology of Writings of Ruth Suckow. 4. Anthologized Stories” (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Dorrance & Company, 1972), 208-211.

[ii] Allan Nevins, “A Painter of Iowa: Review of the Bonney family,” The Saturday Review of Literature, March 10, 1928, https://www.unz.org/Pub/SaturdayRev-1928mar10-00666 (Feb. 14, 2016).

[iii] Tom Longden, “Famous Iowans. Ruth Suckow: Writer, 1892-1960, Hawarden,” Des Moines Register, (April 5, 1992), http://data.desmoinesregister.com/famous-iowans/ruth-suckow (Feb. 6, 2016).

I’m now the webmaster for the Suckow website (www.ruthsuckow.org) and the VP of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association. Mike and I married and he developed the original website and then turned it over to me.

I used one of Suckow’s stories--"A Rural Community"--with my Community College literature students at Hawkeye, and was amazed that a story written in the 1920s still resonated. They could relate to the story of Ralph, who visits his hometown and adopted parents, and find it is both changed, and the same. His parents worry about him being single, bring up his high school girlfriend, and wonder if she is still available. They laugh at that and then say how hungry they get reading the description of the lunch his old mother makes:

“And he knew the food! The platter of fried chicken, the mashed potatoes with the butter making a little golden hollow, the awkward bowl of gravy, the big slices of good home-made Iowa bread, the cucumber pickles, sweet pickles, beet pickles, red jelly, honey, corn relish, in a succession of little glass dishes that kept him so busy passing he hardly knew when to eat.”

My students liked the way the story began and ended with the train arriving and then departing. There is a very reflective tone to the story and while the story is 20 pages long, they commented on being able to relate to the main character, who comes away feeling reconnected to his family and to the land. I have read the ending to the story out loud to my students many times, and feel a sense of awe as I do, because it is so descriptive and satisfying. I am the sixth generation of my family in Iowa, with roots deep in rural Tama and Marshall counties. I understand Ralph's sense of quietude.

"But he was aware that since he had stepped off the train in the morning, the current of his thoughts had been changed. He felt steadied, deeply satisfied. He looked toward the dark pastures beyond the row of dusky willow trees. They widened slowly into the open country which lay silent, significant, motionless, immense, under the stars, with its sense of something abiding.

The train came in – huge, noisy, threatening in the silence. Ralph sprang expertly aboard. The familiar sense of travel engulfed him immediately. He had found his berth, arranged things swiftly, before the station of Walnut was left behind. He was alert, modern, a traveler again.

But all night long, as he lay half sleeping, swinging lightly with the motion of the train, he was conscious of that silent spreading country outside, over which changes passed like the clouds above the pastures; and it gave him a deep quietude."

To download a copy of "A Rural Community," you can visit the Suckow website. Or, you can click on the copy attached below!

Last updated May 3, 2017