''The Golden Bowl'' is the first novel by

Frederick Manfred Frederick Feikema Manfred (January 6, 1912 – September 7, 1994) was an American writer of Westerns, very much connected to his native region: the American Midwest, and the prairies of the West. He named the area where the borders of Minnesota, ...

(1912-1994) published in 1944 under his birth name Feike Feikema. Manfred insisted on this title, which is identical to Henry James' better known novel, even when his friend

Sinclair Lewis Harry Sinclair Lewis (February 7, 1885 – January 10, 1951) was an American writer and playwright. In 1930, he became the first writer from the United States (and the first from the Americas) to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which was ...

argued against it. The novel is set during the

Dust Bowl The Dust Bowl was a period of severe dust storms that greatly damaged the ecology and agriculture of the American and Canadian prairies during the 1930s. The phenomenon was caused by a combination of both natural factors (severe drought) a ...

in Oklahoma. It follows a few months in the life of Maury Grant, an itinerant farm boy whose family has been wiped out in the disaster. Grant becomes a reluctant hired hand at the Thor family farm in southwestern

South Dakota South Dakota (; Sioux: , ) is a U.S. state in the North Central region of the United States. It is also part of the Great Plains. South Dakota is named after the Lakota and Dakota Sioux Native American tribes, who comprise a large porti ...

, leaving them in despair of the hopelessness of their situation, returning a few weeks later and, Manfred implies, remaining. The last pages depict a "black blizzard" with gripping vividness. Manfred drew on his life experience to write the story. He grew up on an

Iowa Iowa () is a state in the Midwestern region of the United States, bordered by the Mississippi River to the east and the Missouri River and Big Sioux River to the west. It is bordered by six states: Wisconsin to the northeast, Illinois to th ...

farm, then after graduating from college, he struck out to see the country, hoboing west to

Yellowstone Yellowstone National Park is an American national park located in the western United States, largely in the northwest corner of Wyoming and extending into Montana and Idaho. It was established by the 42nd U.S. Congress with the Yellowston ...

and back. ''The Golden Bowl'' is based on those adventures and his firsthand experience of the Dust Bowl. (Many years later, Manfred would write a memoir of his cross-country adventure, ''The Wind Blows Free.'') ''The Golden Bowl'' has been in and out of print repeatedly, including a fiftieth-anniversary edition by the South Dakota Humanities Center.

References

Robert C. Wright, ''Frederick Manfred'' (Twayne's United States Authors series ; TUSAS 336) {{DEFAULTSORT:Golden Bowl 1944 American novels Works about the Dust Bowl 1944 debut novels