Hedwig

(price-clipped) [moderate shelfwear, light soiling to edges of text block; the jacket is worn, internally tape-reinforced along edges and folds, shallowly chipped at the top of the spine and along the top edge of the rear panel, with a small surface-scrape mark on the front panel]. Very uncommon novel (his first for adult readership) by the renowned folklorist, whose particular specialty was the Ozarks region. He had already written one general book about its people and culture ("The Ozarks: An American Survival of Primitive Society," published in 1931), followed it up with two volumes of anecdotal Ozarks-related material, co-edited a collection of Ozarkian hunting and fishing stories, and had written a juvenile nature story for boys ("The Camp on Wildcat Creek"), but this was his first foray into full-blown fiction. It bears the usual sort of disclaimer about all characters being fictitious, but given how thoroughly Randolph was already steeped in the culture of the region, it seems more than a little possible that this first-person-narrated tale of "a German-Russian girl who comes to the Ozarks by way of Kansas and Oklahoma" was also fact-based. Rather than a disguised "as told to" narrative by a single woman, though, it might well have been more of an amalgamation of every hard-luck story he'd ever heard from the women of the region -- since the titular character's experiences run the table, encompassing "migration, glamorous young love, hardships, marriage, brutality, childbirth, divorce, illicit loves, poverty, [and] prostitution." Hedwig, however (we're told in the jacket blurb), is "stolid, simple, peasant-like, uncomplaining, [and] posseses the 'patience of the grass'," and therefore comes through all this misery and "emerges philosophic and undented." (I wonder if the blurb-writer mean "undaunted")

Product Info

Publisher: The Vanguard Press

Year: (c.1935)

Type: Used

Binding: Hardcover

First Edition

Seller Info

ReadInk

Address: 2261 West 21st St. Los Angeles, California

Website: https://www.readinkbooks.com

Country: United States