Country Tales

by Elizabeth Clark, Amanda Harvey (Illustrator)

From the Several years ago a New York editor rejected some of my work on the grounds that it was too "rural". Rural people comprise only three percent of the nation's population," she wrote. "We cannot consider what appeals only to them." Yet if we judge from the success of such authors as James Herriot and Garrison Keillor and the recent television reprise, "Return to Mayberry," many Americans in all parts of the country, urban as well as rural, find appeal in the values and ways of the "rural". Why is that? Mainly it has to do with people touching people in ways that matter most, not in the insincere, by-the-pop-psychologists'-rulebooks ways we see too much of today in more sophisticated societies.

135 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996