The Dirt Farmer's Son

An autobiography of a boy born in northwestern Iowa, who grew up partly on a dirt farm and partly in Sioux City as the son of a saloon-keeper. He went on to become a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The first 15 years of the author's troubled life are given in a narrative that also serves as a history of Iowa during the 1930s and the early 1940s: the Depression, the farmer's rebellion, the milk way, the beer wars, card gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging. The balance of the author's life is shown in 100 annotated photographs.