Gone the Hard Road

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin grew up in Illinois and now teaches in the MFA program at the Ohio State University. Like many recent titles that IUP has put out successfully, this has a strong Midwest connection and a terrific writing style.

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"Count your blessings," his mother told him, "Think of everything good in your life."

Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin has done it again. Building from his acclaimed first memoir, From Our House, which recounts the farming accident that cost his father both his hands, Gone the Hard Road is the story of Beulah Martin's endurance and sacrifice as a mother, and the gift of imagination she offered her son. Martin unfolds the world she created for him within their unsettled family life, from the first time she read to him in a doctor's office waiting room, to enrolling him in a children's book club, to the books she bought him in high school. Gone the Hard Road portrays Beulah's selflessness as the family moved around the Midwest, sometimes in the face of her husband's opposition, to show her son a different way of being. Rather than concentrate on the life his father threatened to destroy, as Martin's previous memoirs do, Gone the Hard Road offers the counternarrative of a loving mother and the creative life she made possible, in spite of the eventual cost to herself.

A poignant, honest, and moving read, Gone the Hard Road will stay with anyone who has ever struggled to find their place in the world.