DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Plowman Sings

Zachary Michael Jack editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:University Press of America

Published:1st Oct '08

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

The Plowman Sings cover

Jay G. Sigmund stands as America's most forgotten Regionalist writers of the Jazz Age. Championed by Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and Grant Wood, the Iowa writer/insurance man helped make his home state the epicenter of a national Regionalist Movement. The literary stir Sigmund created caused even popular Boston-based critic E. J. O'Brien to declare Iowa as America's new literary center and to choose six of Sigmund's short stories among the best of 1930. From 1921 to 1937, the late-blooming, dark-horse Sigmund shocked East Coast literati with glowing New York Times reviews while delighting tens of thousands of readers each week with down-to-earth verse in the biggest and best Midwestern dailies. The man Ilya Tolstoy hailed as "an American Chekhov and Maupassant," published over 1200 poems, 125 short stories, and over 25 plays while simultaneously working full-time as an insurance executive. Editor Zachary Michael Jack, himself a celebrated Iowa poet, reintroduces contemporary agrarian writers, poets of place, and eco-critics to Sigmund's essential oeuvre in a jam-packed collection featuring eight Sigmund short stories, more than fifty poems, and a complete one-act play.

Someday when historians of the future cast about in newspapers and magazines for material to enable them to reconstruct ways of life in the Middle West…some one may exhume Sigmund's books…and great will be the joy of the discoverer. -- Newberry Prize-wining author, Charles Finger (1935)
The publication of The Plowman Sings should provide those interested in the making of literary history with ample food for thought. * State Historical Society Of Iowa, Fall 2009 *
It is poetry full of sights and sounds, the smells and colors of the field and the woodland. There are in it that sense of freshness and surprise, that breath of field folk and orchard trees that can only be given back in poetry by one who has learned their names and all their secrets.

ISBN: 9780761842828

Dimensions: 233mm x 155mm x 11mm

Weight: 213g

131 pages