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A Thousand Acres is the powerful, mythic story of an American farm family and the land that nourishes and consumes its members. Three daughters and their husbands are pulled into a tangle of love, jealousy, and fear when their father, Larry Cook, grows too old to manage the family's fertile thousand-acre farm.
Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, A Thousand Acres reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity. “A family portrait that is also a near-epic investigation into the broad landscape, the thousand dark acres of the human heart.... The book has all the stark brutality of a Shakespearean tragedy.”
Nov 4, 1991 · Lear in Iowa. In a seaming, 20th-century version of Shakespeare's tragedy, Smiley—clawing open the ingratitude of a monarch's elder daughters to reveal a rage that could out-tempest Lear's—once again examines the buried secret hurts within families and the deadly results when damaged egos are unleashed: The one thing...maybe no family could tolerate was things coming out into the open ...
A Thousand Acres Questions and Answers. The Question and Answer section for A Thousand Acres is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.. Ask Your Own Question
A Thousand Acres is a novel about relationships, mostly personal and family ones, but there is also a strong relationship between the characters and the land they live on. The novel begins with a description of an intersection of two roads, a flat landscape, and the domed sky above.
A thousand acres, a piece of land of almost mythic proportions. Upon this fertile, nourishing earth, Jane Smiley has set her rich, breathtakingly dramatic novel of an American family whose wealth cannot stay the hand of tragedy.
Widowed father of Ginny, Rose, and Caroline. Larry is a cunning, successful farmer who owns a thousand acres of prime land. His decision to deed his farm to his daughters initiates the action of the novel. Read an in-depth analysis of Larry. Jess Clark. Son of Harold Cook and lover to both Ginny and Rose.
