Fenway Press

Americans are often described (and describe themselves) as dreamers. But what happens when your dream runs smack into reality and fizzles out?
You might end up as a crackpot curmudgeon, blaming your failures on the government, or foreigners, or politically correct liberals, or women, or the vagaries of history, or other enemies of your freedom to do as you damned well please. And feeling your life has been made miserable by subversive forces beyond your control, you might in turn make life miserable for some of those within arm’s reach.
Meet Franklin Pierce Anderson or “FPA” (1856-1932) of Epworth, Iowa, as presented by his grand-daughter, master story-teller Ann E. Berthoff, who in turn has access to the often embittered letters written to her by FPA’s son Benton Rees Anderson, prime target for the old man’s cantakerousness. By judiciously selecting from these remarkable letters her uncle wrote her during the famous Iowa Blizzards of 1975-76, as well as from other sources, Ann Berthoff skillfully weaves a chronicle of her grandfather’s corrosive stubbornness and self-righteous folly, and its impact on those around him.
But if FPA is a prize-winning American Curmudgeon, Benton Rees Anderson emerges from Berthoff’s account as a remarkable American storyteller in his own right, with a sharp eye for the dramas of family life, a muscular prose style, deft analytical skills, and a matchless memory for detail—as we tend to remember insults more vividly than we do praise. Benton was a cultivated man, a teacher, college-educated at a time when few rural American boys—and fewer girls—went past high school. So, inevitably, Benton himself becomes a character in this story. And if writing well is the best revenge, FPA, warts and all, leaps off the page as Benton’s chief creation.
Whether FPA is a “representative American type” or “one of a kind” every reader will have to decide for herself or himself. Berthoff is clear that an injured Benton has given us slanted account of his father. Not everyone on the family felt the same about the old man. So in a way, what Berthoff offers us in Too Late for the Frontier is an exercise in critical biography. Swept along by the power of an engrossingly angry (and awed) portrait of a father by a son, we are still invited to maintain a skeptical distance by Berthoff herself, who in turn resists her own impulse to sentimentalize her childhood visits to the family farm in Iowa. In Berthoff’s words, “The mystery of personality usually outlasts attempts to explain it in terms of cause and effect and the one who seeks to disclose the real secrets of personality often ends by revealing more of himself than of the subject he intends to reveal.”
Fenway Press is delighted to bring you this complex American family chronicle. NOTE: This is a limited edition. To reserve your copy, write to david.gullette@simmons.edu $16 includes shipping.