Literary Fiction · ThoughtfulFour generations of women on a Nebraska farm and in the wider world, from the 1900s to the 1970s
Plains Song
Women of one Nebraska family, over four generations, choose very different lives
Cora Atkins moves west from Ohio to marry Emerson, and she gradually accepts the limits of farm life in Madison County, Nebraska. Her niece Sharon Rose finds the plains stifling and seeks a different life in the East, becoming a music teacher in Chicago and at Wellesley College. The novel sets the two women's outlooks side by side and follows how their family's choices shape later generations.
More about this book
Who
Cora Atkins, a Nebraska farmwife, her husband Emerson, her daughter Madge, and her niece Sharon Rose, who leaves for the East.
World
Madison County, Nebraska, and Chicago, from the early 1900s to the late 1970s.
What makes it different
It has almost no plot and interweaves the lives of four generations of women. It is Morris's twentieth novel, and he has said he wrote it to understand women better.
Feel
Quiet and domestic. It won the 1981 National Book Award for Fiction (hardcover).
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Further reading
- Plains SongEBSCO