In this series of linked stories the child narrator, Veve, cannot fathom all the mysteries of her family’s life together, but by watching and listening she pieces together a painful past. Played out against the backdrop of rural hardship and deprivation on the family’s Kansas farm, the secret in her father’s previous life eventually explains his harsh treatment of the three older children and her mother’s bitterness over his countless misunderstandings and slights. When originally published in 1931, a reviewer of Black Cherries commented that there is “a sharpness about all impressions in the book, a keenness of sensuous and spiritual apprehension that leaves brilliant after-images with the reader.” Another described the series of sketches as “exquisite in texture and so faithful to the childish mind that one derives a warm impression of the imagined young narrator.” Grace Stone Coates (1881–1976) spent most of her life in the tiny ranching community of Martinsdale in southwestern Montana. During a seven-year period, twenty of Coates’s short stories were cited in the annual Best American Short Stories as Distinctive or Honor Roll stories, and John Updike chose Coates’s “Wild Plums” for inclusion in Best American Short Stories of the Century. Coates also published two collections of poetry.

Black Cherries

Literature & Fiction

Grace Stone Coates

Mary Clearman Blew

Short Stories & Anthologies

Bison Books

Grace Stone Coates of Martinsdale, Montana was one of the most widely published poets of the American West during the first decades of the twentieth century. A recent resurgence of interest in this extraordinary writer has brought the republication of her novel, Black Cherries, and the biography, Grace Stone Coates: Her Life in Letters, by Lee Rostad.

Food of Gods and Starvelings

Poetry

Drumlummon Institute

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Books by Grace Stone Coates