Abstract

Tragedy in Minnesota

The article provides information on the book "Wind Without Rain," by Herbert Krause. Anyone who has read Vardis Fisher's Idaho tetralogy will be reminded of the first volume of that somber chronicle when he reads "Wind Without Rain." The grim hills of Minnesota have replaced the grim hills of Idaho, but the life has the same bitterness. Men reap violence and death in a country where nature yields food and warmth grudgingly and lashes out only too often with lightning, tornado, or blizzard. But chiefly both writers dramatize the tragic discord between men and their own souls: the war between warm, natural desires and the blight of a religion packed with hell-fire and brimstone; the brutality of a tyrannical, hard-handed father, goaded by his own sense of guilt and frustration, embittering the lives of his entire household; the tortures of a sensitive boy in the grip of an environment that crushes even the strong.