House of Earth

by Woody Guthrie, Will Patton (Read by), Douglas Brinkley (Read by)

Overview

Featuring the song, "House of Earth" performed by Lucinda Williams.

Finished in 1947 and lost to readers until now, House of Earth is Woody Guthrie's only fully realized novel, a powerful portrait of dust bowl America. It is the story of an ordinary couple's dreams of a better life and their search for love and meaning in a corrupt world.

Tike and Ella May Hamlin struggle to plant roots in the arid land of the Texas Panhandle. Living in a wooden shack, Tike yearns for a sturdy house that will protect them from the treacherous elements. He has the know-how to build a structure made from the land itself—a house of earth. Though they are one with the farm and with each other, the land on which Tike and Ella May live and work is not theirs. Thanks to larger forces, their adobe house remains painfully out of reach. House of Earth is a searing portrait of hardship and hope set against a ravaged landscape, a powerful tale of America from one of our greatest artists.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062333223
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	01/21/2014
Edition description:	Unabridged, Low Price CD
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 5.80(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie (1912-1967) was an American folk balladeer whose best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land." His musical legacy includes more than three thousand songs, covering an exhaustive repertoire of historical, political, cultural, topical, spiritual, narrative, and children's themes.

Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University, the CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and Audubon. The Chicago Tribune has dubbed him “America’s new past master.” His recent Cronkite won the Sperber Prize for Best Book in Journalism and was a Washington Post Notable Book of the Year. The Great Deluge won the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He is a member of the Society of American Historians and the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.

Editorial Reviews

The most welcome miracle of the month is this "new" novel by Woody Guthrie. The folk-singing legend died in 1967, leaving behind thousands of pages of poetry, lyrics, and prose, but only one finished novel. Now published for the first time, House of Earth seems the perfect match for his powerful autobiography Bound for Glory, carrying with it strong portrait of rural resilience and social activism. Though grounded in the Dust Bowl era, this fiction will speak to readers more acquainted with more recent hard times. Editor's recommendations.