Cherie Dargan first encountered the work of Iowa author Ruth Suckow while bumping along a country road in the state’s northeast.
She had accepted an invitation from her husband to attend the annual meeting of the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association in the tiny town of Earlville, and the organization’s president, Barbara Lounsberry, offered the couple a ride.
“So, imagine, I am speeding along in the back of Barbara’s van, reading these short stories, and I fell in love. I thought, ‘This is the Iowa my mother and grandmother grew up in,'” Dargan said on IPR’s Talk of Iowa.
Years later, Dargan, who now serves as an officer for the association, remembers the experience as “astonishing.” This September, the release of a centennial edition of Iowa Interiors, Suckow’s landmark short story collection, aims to make that experience more accessible to readers of today.
Suckow has faded from literary history, overshadowed by her peers in Midwestern literature, from Sherwood Anderson to Willa Cather. But she was well known when she released Iowa Interiors in 1926.
It was Suckow's third book. According to University of Northern Iowa (UNI) Professor of English and coeditor of the reissue Julie Husband, she was famed for her depictions of rural, Midwestern life.
“H. L. Mencken, a very famous editor, sort of championed her work. He promoted her as this Iowa writer, and so she was sort of playing into the crowd when she named it Iowa Interiors,” Husband said.
The collection gathered stories she wrote over six years living in Earlville and working as a beekeeper to support her literary life. Suckow, 34 at the time, had already lived in multiple Iowa communities, as well as Denver, Colorado. The collection put her on the literary map.
Reviews from newspapers at the time are collected and reprinted in the new edition. They heap praise on Suckow’s work, proclaiming her “a consummate artist” of the short story form.
“She really made her reputation as a short story writer,” Husband said.
The plots are often grim, depicting characters facing rural poverty, navigating tense family dynamics or being abruptly severed from their communities. But they also offer a distinct sense of place and resonate with the modern reader, according to Husband.
“The stories are just beautifully crafted, and the people are so familiar,” she said. “Suckow, in very few words, can capture what is unique about a person and what is characteristic of their communication with others.”
Husband coedited the new edition with fellow UNI Professor of English Jim O’Loughlin. Despite Suckow’s lifetime acclaim and the continued value of her writing, O'Loughlin said much of it has fallen out of print.
“Some of her work has been reissued through the years. There was a wave of publications in the 1970s, but that's still 50 years ago,” he said. “So, I think there's a reason why [this] reissue makes it possible for her work to be more widely available.”
O’Loughlin operates the Final Thursday Press in Cedar Falls, which put out the reissue. Releasing roughly one book a year, the press aims to highlight Iowa authors and nurture regional literature — and art more broadly. The new edition is illustrated by Iowa City printmaker Claudia McGehee.
Though Suckow may have faded from history, a contingent of committed readers in Cedar Falls, where Suckow lived for 10 years during her otherwise itinerant life, have worked to keep her legacy alive.
In 2024, Husband and O’Loughlin reissued Suckow’s 1924 novel Country People. That year, the Ruth Suckow Memorial Association and Humanities Iowa assembled a traveling exhibit celebrating the author’s legacy. It has visited over two dozen public libraries across Iowa and is currently on view at the German American Heritage Center in Davenport through Nov. 15.
An exhibition of McGehee’s illustrations is also on view at the Hearst Center for the Arts in Cedar Falls, providing a backdrop for the book’s official launch Sept. 12.
