August 22, 2024

Iowa writer Ruth Suckow is Iowa’s Willa Cather but, sadly, not as well known.

This all is changing with the Ruth Suckow Traveling Exhibit which is traveling around the state and will be hosted by the Robey Memorial Library from Monday, September 16 through Saturday, October 12.

"Ruth Suckow’s first novel, Country People, is set in northeast Iowa,” says Dr. Barbara Lounsberry, President of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association.  “In 9 novels and 43 short stories—most set in Iowa—Suckow captured the lives, passions and struggles of ordinary people in their small towns and farms.  She offers tales of Iowa love and loss, of farm couples retiring and moving to town, of women and men striving to be independent, of going away and coming home.”

Suckow was born in 1892 and died in 1960.  As the daughter of a Congregational minister, she lived in 12 Iowa towns throughout her life: Hawarden, LeMars, Paulina, Algona, Fort Dodge, Manchester, Earlville, Cedar Falls, Grinnell, McGregor, Davenport, and Des Moines.  In 1926, the famous critic H. L. Mencken called Suckow "the most promising writer of fiction—man or woman—now visibly at work in America."

Suckow launched a beekeeping business in Earlville in the early 1920s to support herself as a writer, Lounsberry says.  She had 80 beehives and on Saturdays would drive her truck to sell her white clover honey at the Dubuque Farmers’ Market. 

A free Exhibit talk will be presented by Dr. Barbara Lounsberry, President of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association at Robey Memorial Library on Thursday, October 3 at 5:30pm.