The Long River Home: A Novel

The Long River Home

by Larry Smith

Larry Smith's fourth book of fiction is set in his homeland of Ohio's rural and industrial Appalachia along the Ohio River. It is a story of four generations of family moving from the Civil War times to the 1950's in the Panhandle area of the Ohio River Valley. Fathers and sons live with and work through deep silences to some kind of understanding.

240 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Smith is the author of 9 books of poetry and 6 books of fiction as well as two memoirs and two literary biographies of Kenneth Patchen and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He is married to Ann Smith, a professor of nursing, with 3 adult children and 8 grandchildren. He taught at BGSU Firelands College in Ohio for 38 years. His most recent work includes The Thick of Thin: Memoirs of a Working-Class Writer (2017) and Thoreau's Lost Journal: Poems (2018, new enlarged edition).

Reviews

[Ann Otto · Rating 5 out of 5]

This regional family saga is about Ohio's Ohio River Valley. We follow the McCall family from 1871 until 1949, with some flash-back correspondence from 1965. The characters are well-developed and the author does an admirable job of reminding us who all of them are as the stories progress year-to-year. The book provides good insights into family life among farmers, mill workers and others living on the edge of poverty in the Appalachian foothills of Ohio and West Virginia during this period. If you liked The Glass House, you would like The Long River Home.

[Larry Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

My novel about family in Appalachia...1850-1950. A rich family saga in the Appalachian Working Lives Fiction Series from Bottom Dog Press.