Country Editor's Boy, by Hal Borland

Retrieved from: my library
1970 (link here)
Suggested by: I was moving it from Biography to subject and realized I should read it, being set in Flagler, Colorado
My Ratings: 10 Merit, 9 Interest, 8 Fun

Admittedly, I had to look at a map to find Flagler, and I know I've never been there, but Kent Haruf has made eastern Colorado more of a Place for me than it was when I lived in Colorado. Now I'm a complete junky. And I can see Borland's influence in Haruf now.

The kicker is that this book is about the period that my grandparents were homesteading on the western slope of Colorado, so I thought it would be another way into their lives. It wasn't, really, since Borland's family is towny--his father comes to Flagler to start up a Democratic newspaper to answer the Republican one in existence. In three years, he not only makes good on the paper, but buys out the other one. Imagine: a town of less than 1,000 people with two newspapers!

Really, the books is about Borland discovering that he is growing up and maturing at the same time the "West" is growing up and maturing, at least in white people's terms. I wonder if this is required reading for students in the Flagler area. Probably not. But it probably should be. It's not a difficult book, and it just makes you smell the wind and see the animals; it also reminds us that people really haven't changed much.

Having read this, I want to read "High, Wide, and Lonesome" which my library doesn't own. It's about Borland's childhood in Nebraska and eastern Colorado.