Landscape with Little Figures

FREE LAND--Rose Wilder Lane--Longmans, Green ($2.50).

Few readers remember the pioneer farmers of fiction. For one novel of the calibre of Elizabeth Madox Roberts' The Time of Man, Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth or Hamlin Garland's Middle Border stories, a thousand others appear and are forgotten within the month they are published. A few, like Ruth Suckow's novels of Iowa farm life, are praised but little read.

A few others, like Rose Wilder Lane's Free Land, look solidly good to begin with, turn out to contain the sort of black specks that are sometimes found inside the best-appearing small potatoes. Well-written, soberly sentimental, Free Land is the story of a newly-married homesteader in the Dakota territory. Although claim jumpers, land-grabbers, Indians, horse thieves, come into the story, and the hero is attracted by a neighbor's pretty daughter, Author Lane avoids unpleasant human situations as carefully as a dainty pioneer woman avoiding puddles. Blizzards, droughts and cyclones are the main events; in comparison with them, the struggles of the people, for all their physical vigor, seem pretty placid. The story suggests a landscape by Grant Wood--sweeping vistas of prairie country in which human figures appear as small and indistinguishable as gnats.

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