Preview of Harvesting Ballads Summary:

One of the novel's central themes is Sorry's search for who he is, his identity, both as part of a family and as part of a community. How does a man identify himself—as a worker, say, a farmer, a singer, a bull rider, a rodeo clown? Is he essentially a part of a family, a tribe, with a function within that unit? Or is he alone and a loner, one who is cut off from the usual structures that provide community? The action of this novel takes place, counting flashbacks, from about 1885 to the 1980s and ranges from a farm in Oklahoma to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. And, if one considers its "Prologue Two," Kimball takes us back one hundred million years to the origins of the Great Plains and to the emergence of all of the forms of life that have occupied that huge sweep of space...