THE THRESHER A NOVEL BY HERBERT KRAUSE WITH INTRODUCTION BY PATRICK HICKS ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Herbert Krause was a poet, novelist, essayist, ornithologist, and environmentalist of the Northern Plains. Born in Minnesota, the setting of his three novels—Wind Without Rain (1939), The Thresher (1946), and The Oxcart Trail (1954)—he moved west over the course of his career. Both in his writing and teaching, he extolled “the vastness and the richness of the land, the leveling of democracy, the freedom of action and the independence of the spirit.”
ABOUT PATRICK HICKS: Patrick Hicks is successor to Herbert Krause as Writer-in-Residence at Augustana University. He is the author of the novel The Commandant of Lubizec (2014), as well as six poetry collections, including Adoptable (2014) and This London (2010). He is also the editor of A Harvest of Words (2010), a collection of contemporary South Dakota poetry. Hicks’ collection of short stories, The Collector of Names, was published in 2015, and he is currently at work on a new novel.
For Johnny Black, the young man we meet in Herbert Krause’s classic Minnesota farm novel The Thresher, his dream of becoming a member of a steam-powered threshing crew has come true. As fireman, he builds the fire that generates the steam and blows the whistle to wake up the rest of the crew. But, as writer Patrick Hicks explains in his introduction, commissioned especially for this edition, Johnny’s ambitions far exceed mastering this new technology, and what he is willing to sacrifice to achieve them is the driving force of the novel. ISBN: 978-0-931170-89-8 510 pages Price: $10.00
