On the earth mother's farm and in her books, life's wonders are in the details. ROCHESTER, WISCONSIN, IS A SMALL TOWN of nine hundred residents thirty miles southwest of Milwaukee. Here, a cozy, white farmhouse sits on two hundred acres of apple...

Novelist Jane Hamilton has never been a slave to the outside world. She writes quietly in her Rochester farmhouse, pacing her work around the needs of her school-age children, letting the story grow naturally within her and following it where ever it goes. ...

In the following essay, Levin traces the influence of 1980s myths about family life on the heroines of A Map of the World, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, and Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, explicating each novel's perspective on “family” in terms of a specifically Midwestern American identity and the interaction between global farming policies and political ideology.

In the following interview, Hamilton discusses her family and career during two meetings with Strasser—one at a public reading, the other at Hamilton's home—detailing the effects of The Book of Ruth on both areas of Hamilton's life.

In the following review, Pritchard examines a selection of recent novels, including Disobedience, arguing that Hamilton's realistic portrayal of a mother-son relationship is “a solid and credible achievement.”