Life in the 1930s and '40s on the small family farms in eastern Iowa was threadbare and tough. It was made endurable by the web of humanity spun by the men and women who built their lives there. The land itself seemed indifferent to its relentless exploitation and yet people, towns, farms and landscape endured in some fashion. The best parts of the farm stayed with Richard Willis when he left, while the rest is long gone. "Long Gone is a perfect title for this remarkable memoir that strips away any fantasy of an idyllic life "in the country" and shows the passions, backbreaking labor and violence of the hard won life lived on an American farm in the middle of the twentieth century. But "long gone " can also be applied to the writing of Richard Willis. The extraordinary scenes he paints and characters he evokes are indeed very rare to find in this century." Patty Dann, Mermaids,