Prairie City, Iowa: Three Seasons at Home » (1st Edition)

Douglas Bauer has written three novels, Dexterity, The Very Air, and The Book of Famous Iowans, and a book of essays, The Stuff of Fiction: Advice on Craft. He has taught at Harvard and the University of New Mexico and has been writer-in-residence at Rice University and Smith College. He currently teaches at Bennington College.

Weary from the journalistic treadmill of "going from one assignment to the next, like an itinerant fieldworker moving to his harvests" and healing from a divorce, Douglas Bauer decided it was time to return to his hometown. Back in Prairie City, he helped on his father's farm, scooped grains at the Co-op, and tended bar at the Cardinal. The resultant memoir is a classic picture of an adult experiencing one's childhood roots as a grown-up and testing whether one can ever truly go home again.