First published in 1965, her childhood recollections of living in North Dakota are what Lois Phillips Hudson used to spin these unusual, moving stories of simple, joyful days and of continuing battles with the hostile elements on the Great Plains during the 1930s. Lois Hudson is recognized as a major chronicler of America's agricultural heartland during the grim years of the Great Depression. Lois Phillips Hudson is recognized as a major chronicler of America's agricultural heartland during the grim years of the Great Depression. Reapers of the Dust, now reprinted for a new generation of readers, vividly evokes that difficult time. From Hudson's childhood in North Dakota spring these unusual, moving stories of simple, joyful days, of continuing battles with hostile elements, and of a family's new life as migrant workers on the West Coast.

Reapers of the Dust (Borealis Books)

Literature & Fiction

Hudson, Lois Phillips

Genre Fiction

Minnesota Historical Society Press

Lois Phillips Hudson was a novelist, essayist, professor at the University of Washington, environmental activist, and mother of two daughters. She was born in 1927 in Jamestown, North Dakota. Because of the Depression, her family was forced to move back and forth between North Dakota and Washington State. In 1937 her family finally settled on a twenty-acre homestead in the rural Sammamish River Valley near the town of Redmond, Washington, population, then, only about 300. Unrestorable Habitat: Microsoft Is My Neighbor Now recounts how that valley was transformed over the course of Hudson’s lifetime, roughly the sixty-five years from 1937 to 2003. The Sammamish River Valley was for her what Walden Pond was for Thoreau, what the Lake District was for Wordsworth, what the farm at Port Royal, Kentucky, is for Wendell Berry. It was both her home land and it was the womb of her imagination. Day after day, year after year, she rode her bicycles, first along the county gravel roads of her youth, then along the asphalt pathways of the Kings County Park and Trail System. As she rode, she observed the natural order and its cycles; she observed the human habitation of this world and how it changed the natural order; she saw rivers where salmon had once been plentiful now dammed for power generation and straightened for flood control. Parking lots covered wetlands. Golf courses and soccer parks replaced farm fields. Suburban housing developments overran apple and cherry orchards. Hudson’s rural habitat of small farms, salmon streams, forests, and the human community closely tied to the natural world were transformed into the suburban technological-capitol of the world, the headquarters of Microsoft, Hudson’s new “neighbor.” Unrestorable Habitat: Microsoft Is My Neighbor Now was not published during Hudson’s lifetime. Hudson left a manuscript that is substantially complete, but not fully finished. The book tells a unified story. It has a clear beginning, coherent development of ideas, and a satisfying conclusion. But it is obvious that Hudson had not done her final editing. There are many parenthetical comments within the text where she reminds herself to recheck sources, to verify facts, and to delete repetitions. We are able to observe Hudson’s thought process as she makes suggestions for further revision of her book. Also, there are a few typographical mistakes. However, the text is being published as Hudson last left it, without editorial corrections.

Unrestorable Habitat: Microsoft Is My Neighbor Now

Science & Math

Biological Sciences

Foreverland Press

Lois Phillips Hudson is recognized as a major chronicler of America’s agricultural heartland during the grim years of the Great Depression. Reapers of the Dust, now reprinted for a new generation of readers, vividly evokes that difficult time. From Hudson’s childhood in North Dakota spring these unusual, moving stories of simple, joyful days, of continuing battles with hostile elements, and of a family’s new life as migrant workers on the West Coast. While drawn from her own experiences growing up in North Dakota and migrating west during the Dust Bowl Diaspora, these stories are beautifully imagined and exquisitely rendered. Hudson was well ahead of her time in the ways in which she blends reality and imagination and in so doing blurs the boundaries of each in ways that would become common practice among writers in the generations following her. Her characters seem so real precisely because they are so perfectly crafted. Hudson’s experience certainly colors their world and shapes their character but they come fully and vividly alive only through the power of her art.

Reapers of the Dust: A Prairie Chronicle

GUTERSON, David

Humor & Entertainment

Counterpoint

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Books by Hudson, Lois Phillips