It’s once again a presidential election year in the United States, and so I, like many other scholars of rural America, am bracing myself for an avalanche of simplistic political takes that paint rural America as a wasteland of conservative white people irretrievably behind the rest of the country. I study rural America through the lens of multiethnic literature, spotlighting the quarter of rural Americans who are people of color and showing that rural America can be a site for vibrant, contemporary, and cosmopolitan life. In this list, I suggest ten novels by writers from a variety of backgrounds, set in different parts of the country, and that understand rural America in many ways.
The ten novels in this list represent a diverse cross-section of rural America and might help readers—regardless of their own relationship to rurality—begin to understand an often-misrepresented part of the country. Novels are particularly useful for a list like this one since they don’t claim to be documentaries or sociological studies. Despite the clickbait-inspired title for this listicle, these novels won’t give you a comprehensive understanding of rural America. Rather, they’ll challenge you to consider how writers represent character, scene, and change over time.
Reading novels can also allow us to consider both romanticized and realistic visions of rural America—and how the romanticized affects the real. Literature often originates or advances tropes about rurality (for example, the title of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road (1932), which doesn’t appear on this list, has become a shorthand for a poor and backwards Southern locale). A lot of these novels find truth in between exaggeration and documentation. They’re not all novels I love, but they’re all novels I find useful to think with and against. I hope you find them useful, too.
1. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie (1935)
This is certainly not one of my favorite novels about rural America, but I chose it because it’s an excellent example of how romanticized notions of the rural become real and present. Most people who grew up in the US have some kind of experience with the Little House series, based on Wilder’s childhood on the nineteenth-century frontier. In my scholarly work, I write about the Little House books as a “master narrative” of American rurality. Showing how the Ingalls family carves out a rural life, and rife with descriptions of crafts, the books serve as a kind of how-to manual for rural—and American—life (In the author’s note to Prairie Lotus (2020), an Asian American revision of Wilder’s books, Linda Sue Park writes of trying to copy Laura and her sisters in order to fit in as a second-generation American). Wilder is often a key figure in elementary school social studies units. Importantly, the books also advance disturbing racial attitudes, especially through the deeply racist representations of Native Americans in Prairie.
2. Louise Erdrich, The Birchbark House (1999)
Louise Erdrich is considered a titan of Native American literature, and her own series of children’s novels acts as a corrective to Wilder’s. The Birchbark House, the first installment in the series, follows Omakayas, a young Ojibwe girl living in what is now northern Wisconsin in the 1840s. Erdrich describes the series as an “attempt to retrace [her] family’s history.” With an unforgettable central character, strong family relationships, and moving descriptions of the environment, Erdrich paints a portrait of Indigenous land sovereignty and shows that all rural American places were Native first.
3. Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Última (1972)
A lot of novels about rural America (over half this list) are narrated from the perspective of children. There’s something about a coming-of-age narrative that gets at the heart of rural America’s many perspectives and its status as a site of ongoing change. Set in 20th century rural New Mexico, this now-classic novel follows young Antonio Marez as he’s torn between two different rural lifestyles—the roaming vaquero life of his father’s family and the more settled agricultural practices of his mother’s. Elderly curandera Última, through her folk spirituality, helps Antonio reconcile these competing visions and feel like he belongs in his rural environment.
4. Milton Murayama, All I Asking For Is My Body (1975)
This coming-of-age narrative is more of a novella. Kiyoshi “Kiyo” Oyama, the second son in a Japanese American family living on a sugar plantation on Maui, narrates a series of vignettes. The segregated conditions of the plantation are on display, as are the difficulties Kiyo and his peers face after the attack on Pearl Harbor (which occurs about three-quarters of the way through). Kiyo and his brother strive for bodily and financial autonomy as they attempt to get their family out of debt.
5. Randall Kenan, A Visitation of Spirits (1989)
This novel is wonderfully weird, filled with time jumps, stylistic shifts, and many hallucinatory scenes (For example, a bison drinking tea in a theater). It begins with sixteen-year-old Horace Cross casting a spell to try to turn himself into a bird in rural North Carolina. Flashbacks and flash-forwards show Horace’s life as a queer Black teenager in a school that’s said to look like a prison or a plantation. Some chapters come from his cousin (and school principal) Jimmy’s point of view, as Jimmy reckons with Horace’s place in the community. Although Horace chafes against some of his community’s norms, he retains a love for his environment—when choosing a bird to become, he thinks, “He had to stay here.”
6. Helena María Viramontes, Under the Feet of Jesus (1995)
This novel, set in the fields of California’s Central Valley, marries coming-of-age with environmental justice. It has possibly the most vivid imagery I’ve ever encountered in a novel—at one point, its protagonist reflects on how unrealistically pale and cheerful the Sun-Maid Raisins maiden looks. Its characters are young Mexican American farmworkers, including Estrella, a remarkable young woman whose steadfastness holds her family and friends together. Viramontes expertly shows the precarity these teenagers and their families face, whether it be from sweeps of “La Migra” or the hazards of agricultural labor itself. I challenge anyone to read the harrowing scene where bright young farmworker Alejo is sprayed with pesticides without feeling like they themselves can’t breathe.
7. Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres (1991)
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Smiley translates Shakespeare’s King Lear to a farm in Iowa in 1979 (on the cusp of the Farm Crisis). It’s unmistakably a tragedy, but feels like an entirely fresh story—it’s told from the perspective of Ginny, farmer Larry Cook’s oldest daughter. In an inheritance scheme gone wrong, Larry emerges as the villain, equally interested in subjugating his daughters and rural land. This novel is as searing an indictment of unsustainable farming in the Midwest as it is of patriarchy.
8. Percival Everett, Watershed (1996)
The prolific Percival Everett has gained more recognition in recent years—The Trees was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize, and Erasure served as the basis for the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction (2023)—but don’t overlook his earlier work. Watershed sees a misanthropic African American hydrologist travel to a fictional reservation in the Southwest to fish, where he quickly becomes entangled in a plot about water rights and tribal sovereignty. In his signature wry, absurdist tone, Everett compares different kinds of racialized rural experiences.
9. N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968)
Most of the novels on this list take place almost entirely in rural areas, but sometimes writers need to explore urban spaces in order to really understand rurality. This novel by the recently departed Momaday was the first book by a Native American writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. It moves between a Jemez Pueblo community in rural New Mexico and urban Los Angeles, dramatizing the Relocation policy that encouraged Native Americans to move to cities (and away from their remaining sovereign lands). The novel explores PTSD in its veteran protagonist, Abel, as well as Native spirituality—a pan-Indian spirituality in Los Angeles as well as traditional healing ceremonies in New Mexico.
10. Marie Myung-Ok Lee, The Evening Hero (2022)
Lee has written a number of young adult novels that draw on her childhood in rural Minnesota, including Finding My Voice (1992), one of the first Asian American-authored young adult novels featuring a contemporary Asian American protagonist. In her long-incubated first adult novel, she returns to rural Minnesota but with an ambitious, expansive scope. The protagonist is Yungman Kwak, an elderly Korean American OB/GYN who loses his job to a rural hospital closure. The novel follows him between rural Minnesota, the Twin Cities, and a diasporic return to Korea. Lee brilliantly satirizes disinvestment in rural healthcare and the corporatization of healthcare in rural and urban spaces. She also addresses aging, migration and displacement, and the trauma of the Korean War. This is undeniably a rural American novel, but one that, like every corner of rural America, contains a whole world.
Surabhi Balachander received her PhD in English Language and Literature from the University of Michigan in summer 2024. Starting fall 2024, she will be an assistant professor at Oregon State University. Her work can be found in Western American Literature, ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, and elsewhere.
