Long
Gone
By Richard Willis
Life in the 1930s and '40s on the small family
farms in eastern Iowa was threadbare and tough. It was made
endurable by the web of humanity spun by the men and women
who built their lives there. The land itself seemed indifferent
to its relentless exploitation and yet people, towns, farms
and landscape endured in some fashion. The best parts of the
farm stayed with Richard Willis when he left, while the rest
is long gone.
"Richard Willis' Long Gone
evokes, with an unsentimental and mordant voice, the less-than-idyllic,
often brutal realities of Iowa farm life during the Great
Depression. The language is spare and funny; the subject affecting.
For anyone who has ever farmed, Long Gone rings true.
And for any reader, Long Gone is a piercing, authentic memoir
of American life."
Nicola Smith, Harvest: A Year in the Life of an Organic
Farm
"Long Gone is a perfect title for this remarkable
memoir that strips away any fantasy of an idyllic life "in
the country" and shows the passions, backbreaking labor
and violence of the hard won life lived on an American farm
in the middle of the twentieth century. But "long gone"
can also be applied to the writing of Richard Willis. The
extraordinary scenes he paints and characters he evokes are
indeed very rare to find in this century.”
Patty Dann, Mermaids, The Goldfish Went On Vacation, Sweet
and Crazy.
'What Willis has done, though -- and with uncommon clarity
of style -- is to give readers the minute details of day-to-day
life at a time before mass mechanization changed the economic
and physical landscape forever. This is the way things were
before Archer Daniels Midland became synonymous with the grain
belt and food became abundant.''
Thestreet.com
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here to read the full review
''Few Americans remember what it was like to learn in a one-room
schoolhouse. One who does is Richard Willis, an 80-year-old
New York actor and retired theater professor who played Asa
Buchanan's butler, Nigel, on the soap opera One Life to
Live. He recalls the small white Aurora Schoolhouse in
Long Gone (Greenpoint Press, 192 pp., $20, paperback),
a new memoir of growing up on farm in Iowa.''
One Minute Book Reviews
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here to read the full review
'Life on a farm in Marengo, Iowa, in the 1930s and '40s was
just plain hard. Richard Willis recalls it without bitterness
or nostalgia. He records it: what it looked like, sounded
like, and felt like.''
The Boston Globe
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here to read the full review
''An evocative new book, Long Gone, by Richard Willis,
published by Greenpoint Press, puts to rest many of our 21st
century notions about the idyllic family farm. In this beautifully
crafted memoir, the author recounts his childhood days growing
up on his family's farm in Eastern Iowa during the hardscrabble
days of the Great Depression.''
Food and Things
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here to read the full review
''Long Gone is not a story for the sentimental.
There is sentiment in the story, but it is the kind that Wordsworth
describes as lying ''too deep for tears.'' The underlying
message is that the weak and sentimental couldn't (and didn't)
survive small farm life in Iowa during what was the poorest
American decade of the 20th century. There is much resentment
in Willis' account of his years on the farm, but there is
also appreciation for what his mother and father experienced,
and there is a grudging sort of love for the little farm itself,
its animals (horses especially) that quite literally kept
the family alive by working the land, giving eggs, milk, fertilizer,
and ultimately their lives.''
Perigee
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here to read the full review
''Marengo native Richard Willis traveled the world and graced
the large and small screen, but the experience of growing
up in rural Marengo during the Great Depression impressed
Willis enough to memorialize his childhood in the 2007 book,
Long Gone.''
Marengo-Pioneer Republican
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here to read the full review
Interview with Richard Willis
''Long Gone started as an impulse to revisit people
and places from my past. Like Emily in Our Town,
I wanted to see, visit with and talk with my friends and acquaintances
from long ago.''
TheStreet.com
Click to Watch
the Interview with Richard Willis
Richard Willis is a former professor of theater at Northwestern
University and Lewis and Clark College; and he is an actor
who has appeared in numerous regional theater productions,
movies, including Drugstore Cowboy and Cops and
Robbers, and in soap operas, including All My Children
and Another World. His work has appeared in Red
Wheelbarrow, New Author’s Journal, and
Words of Wisdom.
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