House of Earth
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Will Patton
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Douglas Brinkley
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By:
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Woody Guthrie
About this listen
Featuring the song, "House of Earth" performed by Lucinda Williams.
Finished in 1947 and lost to fans until now, House of Earth is Woody Guthrie's only fully realized novel, a powerful portrait of dust bowl America. It is the story of an ordinary couple's dreams of a better life and their search for love and meaning in a corrupt world.
Tike and Ella May Hamlin struggle to plant roots in the arid land of the Texas Panhandle. Living in a wooden shack, Tike yearns for a sturdy house that will protect them from the treacherous elements. He has the know-how to build a structure made from the land itself - a house of earth. Though they are one with the farm and with each other, the land on which Tike and Ella May live and work is not theirs. Thanks to larger forces, their adobe house remains painfully out of reach. House of Earth is a searing portrait of hardship and hope set against a ravaged landscape, a powerful tale of America from one of our greatest artists.
©2013 Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc. Introduction copyright © 2013 Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp (P)2013 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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The Beans of Egypt, Maine introduced the world to the notorious, unforgettable Bean clan of small town Egypt, Maine. Through her story of the Beans's struggle with their inner demons to survive against hardship and societal ignorance, Chute emerged as a writer of immense humanity and unparalleled insight into a world most of us knew little of - if we'd recognized it at all.
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1985-2018
- By Raelyn M Viti on 08-21-18
By: Carolyn Chute
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The Long Valley
- By: John Steinbeck, John H. Timmerman - introduction
- Narrated by: Holter Graham
- Length: 8 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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A Penguin Classic. First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm the land and struggle to find a place for themselves in the world, these stories reflect Steinbeck’s characteristic interests: The tensions between town and country, laborers and owners, past and present.
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Generally Good Stories, Some are Great
- By Michael on 06-18-13
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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Mudbound
- By: Hillary Jordan
- Narrated by: Ezra Knight, Kate Forbes, Joseph Collins, and others
- Length: 9 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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Hillary Jordan's mesmerizing debut novel won the Bellwether Prize for fiction. A powerful piece of Southern literature, Mudbound takes on prejudice in its myriad forms on a Mississippi Delta farm in 1946. City girl Laura McAllen attempts to raise her family despite questionable decisions made by her husband. Tensions continue to rise when her brother-in-law and the son of a family of sharecroppers both return from WWII as changed men bearing the scars of combat.
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May this South never rise again.
- By Betty on 03-25-12
By: Hillary Jordan
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Rapture of Canaan
- By: Sheri Reynolds
- Narrated by: Alyssa Bresnahan
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Novelist Sheri Reynolds weaves lyrical prose and folksy dialogue into her spellbinding tales. The Rapture of Canaan, a New York Times best-seller, is the moving story of a teenaged girl clashing with her harshly controlled world. Growing up in a closed religious community deep in the rural South, 15-year-old Ninah Huff painstakingly and obediently follows her church’s many rules—she knows that public humiliation follows the smallest transgression
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Really good story
- By mctoria on 08-15-24
By: Sheri Reynolds
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This Side of the Sky
- By: Elyse Singleton
- Narrated by: Myra Taylor, Sharon Washington, Richard Ferrone
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning journalist Elyse Singleton delivers what Essence calls “a gem - the perfect book to curl up with.”
Best friends Lilian and Myraleen, two African American women from rural Mississippi, travel to Europe during World War II to act as members of the Women’s Army Corps. During this time of segregation and destruction, both women discover love and heartbreak, triumph and defeat.
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A Breath of Fresh Air
- By Adina Andreu on 07-19-12
By: Elyse Singleton
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Sula
- By: Toni Morrison
- Narrated by: Toni Morrison
- Length: 5 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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Nel and Sula's devotion is fierce enough to withstand bullies and the burden of a dreadful secret. It endures even after Nel has grown up to be a pillar of the black community and Sula has become a pariah. But their friendship ends in an unforgivable betrayal—or does it end? Terrifying, comic, ribald and tragic, Sula is a work that overflows with life.
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Good against evil and a riotous story to boot
- By Karen on 04-11-11
By: Toni Morrison
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Ava's Man
- By: Rick Bragg
- Narrated by: Rick Bragg
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Abridged
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With the same emotional generosity and effortlessly compelling storytelling that made All Over But the Shoutin’ a beloved bestseller, Rick Bragg continues his personal history of the Deep South. This time he’s writing about his grandfather Charlie Bundrum, a man who died before Bragg was born but left an indelible imprint on the people who loved him. Drawing on their memories, Bragg reconstructs the life of an unlettered roofer who kept food on his family’s table through the worst of the Great Depression
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Deeply moving
- By Kate on 08-12-03
By: Rick Bragg
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Promise
- A Novel
- By: Minrose Gwin
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart - one Black, one White; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager - fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel.
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Mostly Disappointing
- By Anjoli on 06-15-19
By: Minrose Gwin
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The Wayward Bus
- By: John Steinbeck, Gary Schamhorst - introduction
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 9 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In his first novel to follow the publication of his enormous success, The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's vision comes wonderfully to life in this imaginative and unsentimental chronicle of a bus traveling California's back roads, transporting the lost and the lonely, the good and the greedy, the stupid and the scheming, the beautiful and the vicious away from their shattered dreams and, possibly, toward the promise of the future. This edition features an introduction by Gary Scharnhorst.
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Steinbeck always touches the heart, makes you feel
- By Kelly on 05-08-17
By: John Steinbeck, and others
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The Wolf Road
- By: Beth Lewis
- Narrated by: Amy McFadden
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Everything Elka knows of the world she learned from the man she calls Father, the solitary hunter who took her under his wing when she was just seven years old. He has taught her how to shoot, track, set snares, and start fires - all the skills she needs to survive in a frozen, lawless land where civilization has been destroyed and men are at the mercy of the elements and each other. But the man Elka thought she knew so well is harboring a terrible secret. He's a killer. A monster.
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Almost too bloody
- By Melissa Fafarman on 12-06-16
By: Beth Lewis
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The Twelve-Mile Straight
- A Novel
- By: Eleanor Henderson
- Narrated by: Allyson Johnson
- Length: 17 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Cotton County, Georgia, 1930: In a house full of secrets, two babies - one light-skinned, the other dark - are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper's daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged behind a truck down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town. In the aftermath, the farm's inhabitants are forced to contend with their complicity in a series of events that left a man dead and a family irrevocably fractured.
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Great read!
- By S. Clay on 11-01-17
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Other Voices, Other Rooms
- By: Truman Capote
- Narrated by: Cody Roberts
- Length: 6 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of 12, Joel Knox is summoned to meet the father who abandoned him at birth. But when Joel arrives at the decaying mansion in Skully's Landing, his father is nowhere in sight. What he finds instead is a sullen stepmother who delights in killing birds; an uncle with the face - and heart - of a debauched child; and a fearsome little girl named Idabel who may offer him the closest thing he has ever known to love.
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Capote’s coming of age story
- By Daniel Diffin on 11-08-23
By: Truman Capote
What listeners say about House of Earth
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Mel
- 03-02-13
The Dustbowl Balladeer
A disciple of Guthrie's would probably read this book and come away with praise for Guthrie's great insight into the future, his prophet-like prescience about global warming. And I'd probably have preferred to hear their views rather than the hour plus introduction by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp. Their collaborative intro is about 1/5 of the book, and while it gives some interesting information and background about Guthrie, it felt subjective and agenda-laden towards the end. Brinkley admitted the two made some *minor changes to the novel's text*, and had I known Depp and Brinkley had taken their pens to Guthrie's pages before I picked this up, I would have opted out.
After the extended introduction, not much happens; a comment I read summed this book up better than anything I could come up with, "An acre of soliloquy for every inch of action." The next half of the novel details the sex between Tike and his wife. Guthrie's descriptions are detailed, blunt, and as gritty as the Dustbowl. The banter between the copulating couple goes on for pages. I wonder if this novel could even have been published during Guthrie's time...Henry Miller's writings were banned from America, and his novels of the "pastoral days of wine and fornication" page for page were no more gritty than Guthrie's opening chapters.
The novel jumps ahead a year. The writing and story improve, but not the couples' state of poverty, and the land is eclipsed by the Dustbowl. In a powerfully beautiful passage, Tike describes the first bawls of his newborn in a string of adjectives that connects the cry of the infant to the cry of the wind, the dust working into the crevices, the locusts chewing on the stalks of wheat, the cry of the homeless and poverty stricken. A heart wrenching bit that validated an otherwise mediocre read. Guthrie's writing style is often streams of adjectives and thoughts tumbling out of his characters and filling pages. This is no Grapes of Wrath - but I doubt that was Guthrie's intention. House of Earth worked for me only as a little piece of insight into Guthrie, and I'm not recommending unless you are one of those Guthrie disciples, or have read other books by Guthrie. There's the possibility that Guthrie wanted other books to represent him -- maybe he left this one unpublished for a reason.
Patton is always amazing, but I while I wouldn't mind his oaken sultry voice whispering sweet nothings in my ear, it was almost - no, it was - uncomfortable listening to him re-enact Tike and Ella in the throes of passion.
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- C. Theimer
- 04-16-13
I didn't finish the book
I liked the introduction, and the reading was very well done and appropriate to the story. Unfortunately, I wasn't far into the book before it really became more porn than story. It's too bad, really, because I suspect that if this hadn't prevented me from listening any further, I might have enjoyed the story itself.
I'm sure others would not have a problem with it, but it's not my cup of tea.
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