Dust

A Kansas farm, a marriage made for the land, and a woman who understands too late what she has agreed to — dust, wheat, mortgages, and a husband who is not cruel, only certain. Emanuel Haldeman-Julius sold literature by the ton: his Little Blue Books, five cents each, put Shakespeare and Darwin into the overall pockets of America. He and his wife Marcet wrote this in 1921, and it is much harder than anything the Blue Books were selling. Sixty plates of farm, harvest and barn paintings by George Bellows and John Francis Murphy run through the text, matching the novel's own weather and work.