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The Midwest hides in plain sight, in both landscape and literary influence. When people think of Midwestern literature, they usually gravitate towards books set in the countryside with an emphasis on community and family. They think of regionalism, or writing that emphasizes unique customs, history, and landscape of a particular place. The critically-acclaimed Iowa author Ruth Suckow has often been described as a “regionalist” writer, yet she rejected that label, insisting that her writing focused on “people, situations, and their meaning”.  One of Iowa’s most prolific writers, Suckow’s forte was the realistic and meticulous portrayal of farming folks, their stories and struggles. Her poetic descriptions of Iowa farm life and grounded portrayals of people are some of the many reasons she is widely recognized as a major Midwestern writer.

Ruth Suckow was born in 1892 in Hawarden, at the time, a newly settled town in the northwestern reaches of Iowa^[1]. She was the second of two daughters born to William John Suckow and Anna Mary (Kluckholm), both descendants of German immigrants^[2]. Her father was a Congregational minister who took up pastorates in nine Iowan towns, providing his family insights to life in small farming communities at the turn of the twentieth century.  Ruth Suckow developed a passion for writing from a young age, a hobby that both her parents strongly supported. In fact, Suckow’s parents were part of a “novel club” in which fifteen couples took turns writing chapters for a novel^[3].  In 1898, the Suckows moved from Hawarden, living in Algona, Fort Dodge, and Manchester before finally settling in Grinnell in 1907, where Ruth’s father accepted a position as field secretary for the Congregational Church.^[4]. After graduating from Grinnell High School in 1910, Suckow attended Grinnell College, leaving at the end of her junior year to study at the Curry School of Expression in Boston. However, after her sister, Anna, contracted tuberculosis, Suckow moved to Denver to stay with her, and enrolled in the University of Denver to finish a degree in English literature. She earned a B.A. in 1917 and an M.A. in 1918. Sadly, Anna died suddenly in 1919, and Ruth returned to Iowa to live near her father – this time in Earlsville, where she began to support herself by beekeeping. While tending to her bees, Suckow also spent a year under the tutelage of John T. Frederick, a noted novelist, critic, and editor at the University of Notre Dame^[5]. In 1921, Suckow published her first short story, “Uprooted,” in the literary journal Midland, which Frederick founded and edited. This story features subjects that Suckow would explore in her later writing, such as the clash between first- and succeeding generations of immigrants (usually people of German ancestry) and daily life in small towns and farming households.

Ruth Suckow’s German heritage was critical to her writing, as many of her characters are first-generation Americans or descendants of immigrants. Suckow first began to explore her German heritage in 1917, when she became reacquainted with her grandfather, a first-generation German immigrant.  He told her many stories of early German pioneers in Iowa, sang German songs, and, like her parents, encouraged Suckow’s writing. With the United States’s entry into World War I in 1917 came a cascade of virulent anti-German sentiment throughout the country. Suckow was vehemently against the Anti-German propaganda being spread by many Americans, which she later described as a “blow first of all to my love of country”^[6]. This disillusionment with America permeated the nation’s literary community and became a prominent theme for many new authors in the 1920s, Suckow included.

Along with “Uprooted,” Frederick published a few of Suckow’s other early short stories in Midland. Frederick also introduced Suckow to other editors, such as Henry Mencken and George Jean Nathan, who each subsequently published Suckow’s work in their respective literary magazines, Smart Set and American Mercury. Another of Suckow’s significant early works is “Four Generations,” a short story about a family reunion on the farm of the old German farmer who had settled the land^[7]. The story’s theme of tradition versus assimilation is still relevant for people immigrating to Iowa today and also clearly reflects Suckow’s devotion to her own familial history. These elements would continue to be front and center in Suckow’s works, especially in her next novel, Country People, perhaps her most renowned work.  Country People is a chronicle of a German family, the Kaetterhenrys, and their rich farmland in Hancock County, Iowa^[8]. The novel covers the family’s generational changes while featuring the state’s technological and economic development in the background. This work instantly earned critical acclaim throughout the state and the country, though some Iowa readers were displeased by the stark realism, as it accurately reflects the drab monotony of farm life^[9]. Suckow then published her second novel, The Odyssey of a Nice Girl, in 1925, noteworthy for taut realism and the exploration of a diverse range of female characters. Though her books were critically acclaimed, they were not earning much revenue. In 1926, Suckow moved to New York City, leaving her home state to be closer to communities of artists and to the center of the publishing industry.   

Suckow’s last major semi-autobiographical novel of the 1920s is The Bonney Family, the story of a minister’s family.  For this novel, she drew significantly from her family’s experiences, reflecting the time they spent in Hawarden, Grinnell, and other Iowa small towns.  She then published Cora (1929) and The Kramer Girls (1930), both works featuring young Midwestern women on journeys of self-discovery and their attempts to create identities separate from familial expectations^[10]. Suckow married Ferner Nuhn, a fellow Iowa writer, in 1929, and the couple spent their first few years together in California, New Mexico, and Iowa. Suckow eventually published the longest of her novels, The Folks, in 1934. While not as popular as her earlier works, this novel explores the same complicated emotions found in  different generations of people in a time of struggle: here, the time between the early 1900s to the Great Depression and Dust Bowl and its impact on the Ferguson Family. While Suckow continued to write after The Folks, her output was significantly less. Suckow served on President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Farm Tenancy Committee in 1936 and moved back to Iowa in 1937, where she and her husband continued to promote the arts and to write.

  Ruth Suckow’s view of Iowa is complicated but poetic: a mixture of self-deprecation, college idealism, pioneer ambition, and the influence of its settlers. In a 1926 essay titled “Iowa,” she refers to her native state as the center of the Midwest: “It combines the qualities of half a dozen states; and perhaps that is the reason why it so often seems, and more to its own people than to any others, the most undistinguished place in the world”^[11].  Due to this amalgamation of identities and cultures, some Iowans, Suckow reasons, feel a profound detachment to their state and the need to escape, usually to pursue work or education.^[12]. Suckow also acknowledges the critical role immigrants have played in founding and shaping Iowa. Some immigrants held on to old traditions, but many came to Iowa to establish new and deep roots and to settle down. While they looked upon the “old country” with deep affection and nostalgia, many settlers from Europe transitioned into viewing Iowa as their new motherland^[13].

In sum, Ruth Suckow published eight novels, three volumes of short fiction, two anthologies of miscellaneous work, and nearly fifty short stories. Her works provide modern readers with a uniquely grounded look into the daily life of farmers in the Midwest and, more specifically, the Iowan frontier. The disillusionment with America after the mistreatment of Germans during World War I, intergenerational conflicts in immigrant families, the sometimes-insurmountable struggles of working-class families are just some of the prominent themes within Suckow’s books still relevant today.  Though many literary scholars have observed that Ruth Suckow is  classified correctly as a regionalist author, they agree also that there is “something more” to her writing that has never been correctly identified.  Perhaps it is these unique heartstrings that Suckow’s realism tugs on that make her a jewel of the prairie.