The John Wood Case - Softcover

Suckow, Ruth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1966218141 ISBN 13: 9781966218142

Publisher: Tivoli Books, 2026

Synopsis

It's a Wonderful Life is a movie about a man named George Bailey who discovers, in the love of his neighbors, how much good he's done in the world. Now imagine that George Bailey turned out to be an embezzler. That's the issue at the core of The John Wood Case, a remarkable novel about the moral crisis that besets a small town in Iowa shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, when it emerges that the community's leading citizen is not at all what he seemed. John Wood himself is the mystery at the heart of the swirling emotions and imperatives that his friends, neighbors and employer must navigate in coping with the scandal. Nobody is hit harder by the revelation than Wood's cherished son Philip, who is about to graduate from the local high school as valedictorian. The tale is brilliantly handled from every perspective by the late Ruth Suckow, possibly America's most unjustly forgotten writer. Originally published in 1959 and set half a century earlier, The John Wood Case will strike readers today as timeless—and irresistible.

About this title

About the Author

Championed by H. L. Mencken and befriended by Robert Frost, Ruth Suckow (1892-1960) was a daughter of Iowa who wrote about its towns and their people throughout her celebrated literary career. Descended from German immigrants, she was born in newly settled Hawarden; her father was a Congregational minister whose work took the family to various rural communities, some little removed from life on the frontier. Suckow later wrote about her own spiritual awakening, and The John Wood Case (her final novel) brilliantly explores what happens when worldly transgression occurs in a religious context. Suckow (pronounced SOO-co) attended Grinnell College and graduated from the University of Denver. In Colorado she learned beekeeping, which would sustain her for some years in Iowa while funding winters spent writing in New York. In 1929 she married the writer Ferner Nuhn, with whom she lived in Washington, DC, California and elsewhere. Much praised in her prime, by the end of her life she had published nine novels and 43 short stories. She is buried in Cedar Falls, Iowa.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tivoli Books
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1966218141
• ISBN 13: 9781966218142
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336