A native of the Great Plains, Sanders captures well what it is to live and survive the harsh territory of America's flatlands. Unlike his literary forebears, however, writers such as Willa Cather, Mari Sandoz, and Wright Morris, Sanders does not romanticize - as Cather or Sandoz often did - the Plains experience; nor does he disengage his characters, in the manner of Morris, from the emotional weather straining to engulf them or to blow them off the earth's face. The grotesque place of Sanders's world places his people deep in the drought, the deluge, the erosion, and - even if they should fail - they go out scraping and scrapping. This is fiction that sees stubbornness as a virtue, ugly and mean as such virtue may be.