The Desert of Wheat
1919
The wheat fields of the Pacific Northwest stretch like a sea of gold under a hard sky, and Kurt Dorn stands at the edge of two wars: the one across the ocean pulling at his patriotism, and the one brewing closer to home, in the form of labor organizers threatening his family's land. His father, a stubborn German immigrant, clings to an older world while the nation demands loyalty. Debt closes in like a drought. The I.W.W. stirs unrest among the workers. And Lenore Anderson, the wealthy rancher's daughter, makes Kurt question everything he thought he wanted. Zane Grey paints the American heartland in 1919 as a battlefield of competing loyalties: to country, to family, to love, and to the land itself. This is a novel about what it means to be American when the old ways are dying and the new world demands you pick a side. The romance crackles against sabotage, suspicion, and a nation learning to see enemies in its own fields.
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“The rugged fallow ground under her feet seemed to her to be a symbol of faith”
— Zane Grey
“Soon he would be walking a beat in one of the training camps, with a bugle call in his ears and the turmoil of thousands of soldiers in the making around him; soon, too, he would be walking the deck of a transport.....feeling under his feet the soil of a foreign country, with hideous and incomparable war shrieking its shell furies and its man anguish all about him.””
— Zane Grey
“Many were the last resting-places of toilers of the wheat there on those hills. And surely in the long frontier days, and in the ages before, men innumerable had gone back to the earth from which they had sprung. The dwelling-places of men were beautiful; it was only life that was sad. In this poignant, revealing hour Kurt could not resist human longings and regrets, though he gained incalculable strength from these two graves on the windy slope. It was not for any man to understand to the uttermost the meaning of life.””
— Zane Grey
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Grey, Zane. The Desert of Wheat. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-desert-of-wheat-57373d07-24d8-430e-ad41-69ce963813dc.Grey, Z. (1919). The Desert of Wheat. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-desert-of-wheat-57373d07-24d8-430e-ad41-69ce963813dcGrey, Zane. The Desert of Wheat. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-desert-of-wheat-57373d07-24d8-430e-ad41-69ce963813dc.
