Crunching Gravel: A Wisconsin Boyhood in the Thirties
by Robert Louis Peters
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993 eISBN: 978-0-299-14103-5 | Cloth: 978-0-299-14100-4 | Paper: 978-0-299-14104-2 Library of Congress Classification PS3566.E756Z463 1993 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.54
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
No nostalgic tale of the good old days, Robert Peters’s recollections of his adolescence vividly evoke the Depression on a hardscrabble farm near Eagle River: Dad driving the Vilas County Relief truck, Lars the Swede freezing to death on his porch, the embarassment of graduation in a suit from welfare. The hard efforts to put fish and potatoes and blueberries on the table are punctuated by occasional pleasures: the Memorial Day celebration, swimming at Perch Lake, the county fair with Mother’s prizes for jam and the exotic delights of the midway. Peters’s clear-eyed memoir reveals a poet’s eye for rich and stark detail even as a boy of twelve.
“Peters misses nothing, from the details of the town’s Fourth of July celebration to the cause and effect of a young cousin’s suicide to the calibrations of racism toward Indians that was so acceptable then. It is a fascinating, unsentimental look at a piece of our past.”—Margaret E. Guthrie, New York Times Book Review
“It’s unlikely that any other contemporary poet and scholar as distinguished has risen from quite so humble beginnings as Robert Peters. Born and raised by semiliterate parents on a subsistence farm in northeastern Wisconsin, Peters lived harrowingly close to the eventual stuff of his poetry—the dependency of humans on animal lives, the inexplicable and ordinary heroism and baseness of people facing extreme conditions, the urgency of physical desire. . . . Sterling childhood memoirs.”—Booklist
“Robert Peters has written a memoir exemplary because he insists on the specific, on the personal and the local. It is also enormously satisfying to read, and it is among the most authentic accounts of childhood and youth I know—a Wisconsin David Copperfield!”—Thom Gunn
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Robert Peters is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, criticism, short stories, and plays, including The Gift to be Simple, What Dillinger Meant to Me, and Poems Selected and New: 1967-1991. He continues to teach literature at the University of California, Irvine.
REVIEWS
“Robert Peters’s clear-eyed memoir . . . gives the reader a realistic look at a hardscrabble farm and one family’s struggle with poverty. There is no self-pity, just a straightforward telling of a story.”—New York Times Book Review
“A commemoration of a nearly lost American agrarian life that, in hauntingly stark prose, reveals the human condition behind the convulsions of formal history.”—Kirkus Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part One: Winter
Accident, Fear
Mother
Watering the Cows
The House
Movies
Father
Lovers' Plunge
The Farm Buildings
The Swedes
Kitchen
Root-Cellar Rat
Rooms
Indians
Igloo
Our Food
The Butchering
The Sow's Head
Venison
Christmas Tree
The Christmas Program
Christmas Morning
Killing the Hen
Ice-Fishing
Harvesting Ice
Part Two: Spring
Thaw
Bathing
Redhorse Run
Homemade Ice Cream
The Radio
Religion
Easter
Ploughing and Seeding
Burning Brush
Birth
Memorial Day
Hens and Chicks
Graduation
Fido
Miscarriage
Timber
Ethics
Music
Part Three: Summer
The Jollys
Albert
Garden and Field
Rumors of War
Fourth of July
Tornado
Church
Learning to Drive the Car
Columbus Lake
The Botterons
Caddying
Finn Hall
Wild Berries
Part Four: Fall
Carnival
County Fair
Human and Animal
Preparations for Winter
Dance Hall
Fights
Halloween
Gym
Esther Austin
Culture
Typewriter
Crappies and Bicycles
First Snowstorm
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Crunching Gravel: A Wisconsin Boyhood in the Thirties
by Robert Louis Peters
University of Wisconsin Press, 1993 eISBN: 978-0-299-14103-5 Cloth: 978-0-299-14100-4 Paper: 978-0-299-14104-2
No nostalgic tale of the good old days, Robert Peters’s recollections of his adolescence vividly evoke the Depression on a hardscrabble farm near Eagle River: Dad driving the Vilas County Relief truck, Lars the Swede freezing to death on his porch, the embarassment of graduation in a suit from welfare. The hard efforts to put fish and potatoes and blueberries on the table are punctuated by occasional pleasures: the Memorial Day celebration, swimming at Perch Lake, the county fair with Mother’s prizes for jam and the exotic delights of the midway. Peters’s clear-eyed memoir reveals a poet’s eye for rich and stark detail even as a boy of twelve.
“Peters misses nothing, from the details of the town’s Fourth of July celebration to the cause and effect of a young cousin’s suicide to the calibrations of racism toward Indians that was so acceptable then. It is a fascinating, unsentimental look at a piece of our past.”—Margaret E. Guthrie, New York Times Book Review
“It’s unlikely that any other contemporary poet and scholar as distinguished has risen from quite so humble beginnings as Robert Peters. Born and raised by semiliterate parents on a subsistence farm in northeastern Wisconsin, Peters lived harrowingly close to the eventual stuff of his poetry—the dependency of humans on animal lives, the inexplicable and ordinary heroism and baseness of people facing extreme conditions, the urgency of physical desire. . . . Sterling childhood memoirs.”—Booklist
“Robert Peters has written a memoir exemplary because he insists on the specific, on the personal and the local. It is also enormously satisfying to read, and it is among the most authentic accounts of childhood and youth I know—a Wisconsin David Copperfield!”—Thom Gunn
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Robert Peters is the author of more than thirty books of poetry, criticism, short stories, and plays, including The Gift to be Simple, What Dillinger Meant to Me, and Poems Selected and New: 1967-1991. He continues to teach literature at the University of California, Irvine.
REVIEWS
“Robert Peters’s clear-eyed memoir . . . gives the reader a realistic look at a hardscrabble farm and one family’s struggle with poverty. There is no self-pity, just a straightforward telling of a story.”—New York Times Book Review
“A commemoration of a nearly lost American agrarian life that, in hauntingly stark prose, reveals the human condition behind the convulsions of formal history.”—Kirkus Review
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Part One: Winter
Accident, Fear
Mother
Watering the Cows
The House
Movies
Father
Lovers' Plunge
The Farm Buildings
The Swedes
Kitchen
Root-Cellar Rat
Rooms
Indians
Igloo
Our Food
The Butchering
The Sow's Head
Venison
Christmas Tree
The Christmas Program
Christmas Morning
Killing the Hen
Ice-Fishing
Harvesting Ice
Part Two: Spring
Thaw
Bathing
Redhorse Run
Homemade Ice Cream
The Radio
Religion
Easter
Ploughing and Seeding
Burning Brush
Birth
Memorial Day
Hens and Chicks
Graduation
Fido
Miscarriage
Timber
Ethics
Music
Part Three: Summer
The Jollys
Albert
Garden and Field
Rumors of War
Fourth of July
Tornado
Church
Learning to Drive the Car
Columbus Lake
The Botterons
Caddying
Finn Hall
Wild Berries
Part Four: Fall
Carnival
County Fair
Human and Animal
Preparations for Winter
Dance Hall
Fights
Halloween
Gym
Esther Austin
Culture
Typewriter
Crappies and Bicycles
First Snowstorm
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE