Harpsong

Rilla Askew

University of Oklahoma Press, Dec 7, 2011 - Fiction - 256 pages

Harlan Singer, a harmonica-playing troubadour, shows up in the Thompson family’s yard one morning. He steals their hearts with his music, and their daughter with his charm. Soon he and his fourteen-year-old bride, Sharon, are on the road, two more hobos of the Great Depression, hitchhiking and hopping freights across the Great Plains in search of an old man and the settlement of Harlan’s long-standing debt.

Finding shelter in hobo jungles and Hoovervilles, the newlyweds careen across the 1930s landscape in a giant figure eight with Oklahoma in the middle. Sharon’s growing doubts about her husband’s quest set in motion events that turn Harlan Singer into a hero while blinding her to the dark secret of his journey. A love story infused with history and folk tradition, Harpsong shows what happened to the friends and neighbors Steinbeck’s Joads left behind.

In this moving, redemptive tale inspired by Oklahoma folk heroes, Rilla Askew continues her exploration of the American story. Harpsong is a novel of love and loss, of adventure and renewal, and of a wayfaring orphan’s search for home—all set to the sounds of Harlan’s harmonica. It shows us the strength and resilience of a people who, in the face of unending despair, maintain their faith in the land.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - GCPLreader - LibraryThing

I discovered this gem while searching through the Willa Cather Western literature prize winners. The setting is the Dust Bowl Depression era of Oklahoma. The novel tells the story of Harlan Singer, a ...

Harpsong

User Review  - Not Available - Book Verdict

American Book Award-winning author Askew (creative writing, Univ. of Oklahoma;Fire in Beulah ) mixes fiction with legend and history in this extraordinary novel of Oklahoma during the Great Depression ...

About the author

Rilla Askew is a novelist, essayist, and short-story writer known for her award-winning historical fiction. Fire in Beulah, her novel about the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, received the American Book Award. Her Dust Bowl novel, Harpsong, received the Oklahoma Book Award, and her essay collection, Most American: Notes from a Wounded Place, was long-listed for a PEN America Literary Award. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. To learn more about her work, visit rillaaskew.com.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Harpsong; Volume 1 of Stories and Storytellers Series
• Author: Rilla Askew
• Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press, 2011
• ISBN: 0806184213, 9780806184210
• Length: 256 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Historical / General; Fiction / Literary