At the height of her career in the 1920s and early 1930s Ruth Suckow was one of America's leading novelists and short-story writers. Her realistic fiction, set in her native Iowa, received high praise from writers such as Sinclair Lewis and Robert Frost. Critics likened Suckow to Anton Chekhov; in the American Mercury (November 1926) H. L. Mencken called her "the most remarkable woman now writing short stories in the Republic." By the time of her death in 1960 Suckow had been labeled as a "Midwestern regionalist." Today her work is practically unknown.

Ruth Suckow was born in Hawarden, Iowa, the second daughter of Anna Kluckholn Suckow and William John Suckow, who was a Congregational minister. In her autobiographical essay "A Memoir" (in Some Others and Myself , 1952), Suckow recalls that she began writing as a child, basing her style on the "purity and economy" of her father's sermons. Since her...