The world turned upside down for city-bred Marjorie Douglas when, in 1943, her young husband moved her and their baby, Anne, from suburban St. Paul to a western Minnesota stock ranch to help his parents stave off financial disaster. With wit and wisdom Douglas's memoir describes a Midwestern way of life of 50 years ago.

"My grandmother, Mae Kirwin, scared me." With that disturbing, distant memory, mystery novelist Mary Logue begins her exploration of the life of her mother's mother, who died more than thirty years ago.

Mae McNally Kirwin was born in 1894 in Chokio, a small prairie community in western Minnesota. In 1926, the sudden death of her husband left Mae to support herself and her five children. These facts were well known, but for Logue, they were not enough. Determined to get to know her grandmother better, Logue sets out to assemble the bits and pieces of her grandmother's life. Along...

In twenty-one interwoven stories, author Robert Amerson re-creates life on his family's 160-acre farm in the remote Hidewood Hills of eastern South Dakota from 1934 to 1942. Each story, told from the perspective of a family member or farmer neighbor, captures the moods, sounds, sights, and relationships of these rural Americans at a time of tremendous change.

Nine-year-old Robert Amerson is a dreamer fascinated by books, airplanes, and cars. As he grows older, he becomes impatient with old-fashioned horse farming, and he struggles to balance his responsibilities to the farm with...

A native New Yorker, the twenty-year-old Ridder arrived in Duluth in 1943 as a new member of a socially prominent family of newspaper publishers. In consciously seeking to be her own person, Ridder found over the following decades numerous outlets for her considerable energies and interests: Minnesota Independent-Republican politics, the Urban League and the emerging civil rights movement, alternative education, Twin Cities regional government, feminist organizations, and the women's athletic program at the University of Minnesota. She interweaves these public details with the more private...

In this poignant memoir, poet-novelist Freya Manfred recounts the artistic life and death of her father, the prolific and highly regarded author Frederick Manfred. Using family letters and passages from her father's novels as well as her own memoirs, she explores their powerful personal and literary relationship, which spanned nearly five decades. Freya manfred described what it meant to be the daughter of a strong-willed man who was dedicated, sometimes at great cost, to a creative life. Her story starts with the tender power and beauty of his funeral in 1994, then moves back to a clear-eyed...

In 1974, lured by good wages, a 22-year-old African American college student from suburban Minneapolis started work as a pipefitter trainee for Minnegasco, a Minnesota natural-gas utility. Peggie Samples was one of the first four women hired by the company into non-secretarial jobs after the passage of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972. On the job, she and her beautiful blond friend Sonny met men who were hostile, men who were helpful, and men who were simply flummoxed to find "girls" in their midst. "S'long as a guy does his job," one told her, "it don't matter ta me if he's a...