9780062263025
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House of Earth audiobook

  • By: Woody Guthrie
  • Narrator: Will Patton
  • Category: Fiction, Westerns
  • Length: 6 hours 36 minutes
  • Publisher: HarperAudio
  • Publish date: February 27, 2013
  • Language: English
  • (1139 ratings)
(1139 ratings)
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House of Earth Audiobook Summary

Featuring the song, “House of Earth” performed by Lucinda Williams.

Finished in 1947 and lost to readers until now, House of Earth is Woody Guthrie’s only fully realized novel, a powerful portrait of dust bowl America. It is the story of an ordinary couple’s dreams of a better life and their search for love and meaning in a corrupt world.

Tike and Ella May Hamlin struggle to plant roots in the arid land of the Texas Panhandle. Living in a wooden shack, Tike yearns for a sturdy house that will protect them from the treacherous elements. He has the know-how to build a structure made from the land itself–a house of earth. Though they are one with the farm and with each other, the land on which Tike and Ella May live and work is not theirs. Thanks to larger forces, their adobe house remains painfully out of reach. House of Earth is a searing portrait of hardship and hope set against a ravaged landscape, a powerful tale of America from one of our greatest artists.

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House of Earth Audiobook Narrator

Will Patton is the narrator of House of Earth audiobook that was written by Woody Guthrie

Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie (1912-1967) was an American folk balladeer whose best-known song is "This Land Is Your Land." His musical legacy includes more than three thousand songs, covering an exhaustive repertoire of historical, political, cultural, topical, spiritual, narrative, and children's themes.

About the Author(s) of House of Earth

Woody Guthrie is the author of House of Earth

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House of Earth Full Details

Narrator Will Patton
Length 6 hours 36 minutes
Author Woody Guthrie
Category
Publisher HarperAudio
Release date February 27, 2013
ISBN 9780062263025

Subjects

The publisher of the House of Earth is HarperAudio. includes the following subjects: The BISAC Subject Code is Fiction, Westerns

Additional info

The publisher of the House of Earth is HarperAudio. The imprint is HarperAudio. It is supplied by HarperAudio. The ISBN-13 is 9780062263025.

Global Availability

This book is only available in the United States.

Goodreads Reviews

Jackie

February 02, 2013

I've spent the last couple of days lost in the 1930s Dust Bowl, specifically on the Texas plains. It's a hard, nasty place to be, but it was enlivened by the passionate Tike and Ella May Hamlin--wheat farmers and plain and simple, but they've got big dreams. They live in a rotting share-croppers shack, but five cents bought them a government pamphlet giving directions to create adobe bricks which would be safe from the horrible winds of the plains, protect them from the heat and the cold, and would not be prone in insect infestation. A place to grow their family in. If they can find land to build on.There is a whole lot of societal, financial and political talk in here, told with a lot of passion, frustration, and hope. It's the same, or very nearly so, that you'll find any time you turn on the news these days. This is the only book Guthrie finished, but he's made it count. He lived through the "Black Sunday: (4-14-1935) dust storm in Pampa, TX. When the storm ended, he was a changed man. He's the one who bought that five cent pamphlet and crusaded for adobe housing for the rest of his life. The lengthy introduction, written by Doug Brinkley and Johnny Depp (yes, THE Johnny Depp), covers a lot of that and Guthrie's life from then on. That alone is fascinating, but combined with the novel, the whole package adds up to a big bite of the history and culture that shaped America. Sometimes funny, sometimes bawdy, sometimes heartbreaking, this book is a gem that will make a big impression on any reader. Just because it was written in 1945 doesn't mean it can't be the best book of 2013, at least in my humble opinion.

Eric

June 24, 2013

Woody Guthrie describes in exquisite detail the bleak existence of a young couple trying to get by in abject poverty in one of the harshest environments this country has had to offer - the Texas panhandle in the 1930's. He hits on his usual themes of the stark contrast between the haves and the have-nots and the resilience and determination of the latter. His writing style, however, surprised me a bit. It's a stream-of-consciousness flow in the local vernacular that would probably be called "beat" if it had been written a decade later (Keruoac wishes he could have written so well). It was written in 1947. The story itself probably could have been told in 30 pages or less, but all the rest of it puts you into a time and place and actually into the imaginations of the characters. The 44 page introduction by Johnny Depp could have been done in 4 pages and left at that. He was trying too hard to set the stage for the story. It didn't need it. Woody took care of that himself quite nicely.

Jack

May 28, 2013

This formerly lost novel, which resurfaced in 2012 among his archival paperwork, is an interesting complement to Steinbeck's "Grapes of Wrath." Guthrie's novel diverges from the exodus of GoW, and finds its story in a couple suffering hardships but staying on their land. The goal of the main character Tike is to forge a house out of the earth -- the wooden homes ravaged by storm and weather were not to his liking, and he studies adobe bricks, and the obsession haunts Tike throughout the novel.Woody's usual demeanor shows in the writing; he cries and sings for the voiceless, the down-trodden, the day-to-day workers putting in effort not generally recognized by humanity. His barbed words toward bankers resonate even today. Would to all that is holy that more Woody Guthries shore up, because there are an endless supply of those folks he depicts in words and song.

Lou

March 29, 2013

“On the fourteenth day of April,Of nineteen thirty-five,There struck the worst of dust stormsThat ever filled the sky.You could see that dust storm comingIt looked so awful black,And through our little city,It left a dreadful track.” In this story Guthrie had his day to write, away from his ballads and in the same vein that Steinbeck undertook to wag his finger at the powers that be, at capitalism during the Great Depression. He was in the turmoil and great storms he felt the peoples plight, is and was the peoples voice and spokesman for the freedom and unshackling of the working class of his time from his shores and those that travelled through Route 66 to a kind of salvation, new home, new birth and a new chance for the underdog.Amongst the main characters passage of passion and loving in this story, which can be quite steamy and visceral, there is his love for things of a more lasting kind, a home of his own built and owned by himself not rented and owned by others. He wants a chance at life to have his family settle with a chance of getting somewhere other than being owned by a corporation or bank he just does not want that.In response to a question our main character Tike puts comical when he's asked“Doesn’t your brain function on any other subject except just this business of making babies?”“Nope. Nuthin’ else. Makin’ babies. An’ earth houses to raise ’em in.” (Tike said)The prose flows in a great rhythmical style with a joy to read and a need for this journey not to end comes to fruition. The author did a great job describing and showing his characters and their feelings and the knows the environment and behavioural pattern of his subjects. It felt like reading a mix of Steinbeck and Henry Miller. There is some deep reflections on the life around the plight of the people of those days and their passions. The authors thoughts string out in threaded words as if your listening to one of his dustbowl ballads, except here they flow along to the right of sentences with a joy to read and ponder on. Before reading this story, I had many of his tracks on my audio playlist including, Tom Joad, Talking Dust Bowl Blues, John Henry, Better World A-Comin, The Great Dust Storm, Dust Bowl Refugee, and This Land Is Your Land, they are all have great lyrics.Steinbeck put it perfectly and in his tribute he wrote about Guthrie, “Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who still listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight again against oppression. I think we call this the American spirit.” It was a clear day. A blue sky. A few puffy, white-looking thunderclouds dragged their shadows like dark sheets across the flat Cap Rock country. The Cap Rock is that big high, crooked cliff of limestone, sandrock, marble, and flint that divides the lower west Texas plains from the upper north panhandle plains. The canyons, dry wash rivers, sandy creek beds, ditches, and gullies that joined up with the Cap Rock cliff form the graveyard of past Indian civilizations, flying and testing grounds of herds of leather-winged bats, drying grounds of monster-size bones and teeth, roosting, nesting, and the breeding place of the bald-headed big brown eagle. Dens of rattlesnakes, lizards, scorpions, spiders, jackrabbit, cottontail, ants, horny butterfly, horned toad, and stinging winds and seasons. These things all were born of the Cap Rock cliff and it was alive and moving with all these and with the mummy skeletons of early settlers of all colors. A world close to the sun, closer to the wind, the cloudbursts, floods, gumbo muds, the dry and dusty things that lose their footing in this world, and blow, and roll, jump wire fences, like the tumbleweed, and take their last earthly leap in the north wind out and down, off the upper north plains, and down onto the sandier cotton plains that commence to take shape west of Clarendon.”“Let them? We caused ’em to steal?”“Yes. We caused them to steal. Penny at a time. Nickel at a time. Dime. A quarter. A dollar. We were easygoing. We were good-natured. We didn’t want money just for the sake of having money. We didn’t want other folks’ money if it meant that they had to do without. We smiled across their counters a penny at a time. We smiled in through their cages a nickel at a time. We handed a quarter out our front door. We handed them money along the street. We signed our names on their old papers. We didn’t want money, so we didn’t steal money, and we spoiled them, we petted them, and we humored them. We let them steal from us. We knew that they were hooking us. We knew it. We knew when they cheated us out of every single little red cent. We knew. We knew when they jacked up their prices. We knew when they cut down on the price of our work. We knew that. We knew they were stealing. We taught them to steal. We let them. We let them think that they could cheat us because we are just plain old common everyday people. They got the habit.”“They really got the habit,” Tike said.“Like dope. Like whiskey. Like tobacco. Like snuff. Like morphine or opium or old smoke of some kind. They got the regular habit of taking us for damned old silly fools,” she said.”“The picture of her face, her eyelids, hair, forehead, ears, cheeks, chin, was one of almost complete peace and comfort. Tike saw a trace, a tiny trace, but a trace of ache, pain, and misery there as she licked her lips and breathed. A feeling came over him. A feeling that had always come over him when he saw her look this way. It was a feeling of love, yet a feeling of fight. A love that was made out of fight, the fight that he would fight if any living human hurt or harmed or even spoke low-down or bad words about his Lady. And for a good long time he seemed to get a higher view, somehow, of their life together, their life on this gumbo land in this shack, and even the land and the shack and their cowshed he felt did not really belong to them. No. It all belonged to a man that had never set foot on it. Belonged to somebody that did not give a damn about it. Belonged to someone that didn’t care about the feelings of their cowshed. Somebody somewhere that did not know the fiery seeds of words and of tears and of passions, hopes, split here on this one spot of the earth. Belonged to somebody who did not think that these people were able to think. Belonged to somebody who had their names wrote down on his money list, his sucker list. Belonged to somebody who does not know how quick we can get together and just how and just fast we can fight. Belongs to a man or a woman somewhere that don’t even know that we’re down here alive. It belongs to a disease that is the worst cancer on the face of this country, and that cancer goes hand in hand with Ku Klux, Jim Crow, and the doctrine and the gospel of race hate, and that disease is the system of slavery known as sharecropping.”“A thousand and one things came back into his mind, things that he ought to be doing, working at, fixing up, getting ready for. His brain commenced to show up moving pictures of all of the jobs he had started, the ones that he had finished, and the ones that had to be started right away. This. That. And the other thing. “This, that, and something else. All of this work, all of these jobs, all of this sweat and good labor poured into a useless bucket and down a senseless drain on a piece of land that did not belong to him, did not shelter Ella May, did not keep them away from the germs, the filth, the misery, did not keep their hides from the heat nor the cold, did not look good to their eyes, and by the law of the land they could not lift a hand to build the place into that nicer one because the man that owned it did not care about all of this. Oh. These. These things. And then a lot of other things came and went, roared and buzzed around in his brain. He tried to dream up some earthly scheme to get his hands on a piece of good farmland to raise up that house of earth on. Ohh. Yes. That Department of Agriculture book was an awful mighty good thing, laying there at her elbow on that hay. But it made their biggest misery even bigger, and their biggest dream even plainer, and their biggest craving ten times more to be craved. A fireproof, windproof, dirt-proof, bug-proof, thief-proof house of earth”“This was the vast and undying beauty, the dynamic and eternal attraction, the lure, the bait, the magnetic pull that, in addition to their blood kin and salty love for the wide open spaces and their lifetime bond to and worship of the land, caused not only Ella May and Tike Hamlin but hundreds of thousands and millions and millions of other folks just about like them to scatter their seeds, their words, and their loves so freely here.”“One year. And what is a year? A year is something that can be added on, but it can never be taken away. Yes, added on, earmarked and tagged, counted in signs of dollars and cents, written down the income column and across the page with names, and photos can be taken of faces and clipped onto the papers, and the prints of the new baby’s feet can be stamped on the papers of the birth, and the print of the thumb going back to work can be stamped onto the papers that say it is a good place to work. And a year is work. A year is that nervous craving to do your good job and to draw down your good pay, and to join your good union. And a year of work is three hundred and sixty-four, or -five, or -six days of the run, the hurry, the walking, the bouncing, and the jumping up and down, the arguments, fights, the liquor brawls, hangovers, headaches, and all. Work takes in all climates, all things, all rooms, all furrows, all streets, all sidewalks, and all the shoes that tramp on them. The whirl and roll of planets do not make a year a year, nor the breath of the trifling wind, changing from cold to hot, forming steam back into ice. Oceans of waters that flow down from the tops of the Smokies and roll in the sea, they help some to make a year a year, but they don’t make the year. Tike had said to Ella May once before they were married, “What a year is, is just another round in our big old fight against the whole world.” What he meant was his fight against the weather and against other men, and sometimes against his own self. But in his own words he was very close to right. He had a right, in a way, to say, “Our fight against the whole world,” because it had always looked to him that his little bunch of people out there on the upper plains were fighting against just about everything in the world. He did not mean that, I, Tike Hamlin, am fighting against the world and all that is in it..........And so the year went around. The wheel of time rolled down the road of troubles. They had the same things hit them day after day. The same cows bawled to be milked every sunset, and bawled to be milked again at every sunrise.” Review also @http://more2read.com/review/house-of-earth-by-woody-guthrie/

C.e.

March 08, 2013

"I wish you'd think up some kind of a way to get us a piece of nice good farmin' land, with an adobe house on it, an' a big adobe fence all around it."Imagine the same words, not just published in this decade but written in it, by a living author. Take the same setting, characters, plot, book cover and the dustbowl colloquialisms. Remove the names Woody Guthrie and Johnny Depp: it is unlikely that you would have read even this far. But Guthrie wrote presciently, breathtakingly of a topic that would not rest and will never rest: the science of homebuilding. Only recently have we affixed the term sustainable construction, but the problem has been around as long as domiciles have. Without the names Guthrie and Depp House of Earth would be confined to the vast archives of genre fiction. But indeed those names are affixed. And should we read it? Absolutely.House of Earth is slow with heat, sluggish with drought. We can count the number of scenes on one hand. In the first half of the book wheat sharecroppers Tike and Ella May Hamlin work, make love, and watch cars on the nearby Highway 66. She compares the vehicles--minuscule with distance--to termites. Their wood-framed house sags with rot: "You little ole rotten p*ss soaked b*stard," Tike curses. (The reader soon recognizes any discussion of rebuilding as pillow talk. Ella May and Tike speak of a hypothetical adobe farmhouse the same way modern couples speak of early retirement in Tuscany.) The book's second half is set a year later. The rotting wood house sags ever further. Ella May is pregnant, and an old injury to her breast courses with pain. There is a worrisome spot where for months she believed herself only to be bruised. Her midwife is running late, and there is a blizzard on the way.As mentioned above, Guthrie handles the dialects unapologetically. Ella May says of a leg massage, "Gosh dern whiz a might gee ohh. Tike, you've not got the least idea how good the feel of your hands is." Elsewhere Tike, failing to define superstition, says "It's th' words of th' dead civilizations an' th' civilizations that ain't even been born yet." The sex scene, for those who count the first grope to the last gasp, is over 40 pages long. It is startlingly personal, too, what with Tike's baby talk and Ella May's play-by-play commentary. Guthrie's intention here is clear. The return to dried earth homes--which are "fireproof, windproof, dirtproof, bugproof, thiefproof" and rotproof--is a return to paradise, and to the incorruption of childhood. But there are no easy answers or clear allies. Farm owners build houses meant to weaken and fall, government officials suggest farmers grow smaller crops, and the bankers foreclose on exactly those plots of land they find most alluring. Private ownership means pride in efforts, but also exploitation and greed. Dirt brings produce, but chokes cattle during dust storms. Wind carries seed, but kills, destroys, erodes. (Neither is the metaphor of bodily fluid as seed lost on the author or his boorish main character.)There are moments when Guthrie's prose means sheer beauty: "spirits of the dead carrying their own dirt, howling, begging, crying somewhere on the upper plains to be born again." Watching the Hamlins struggle against nature--human or otherwise--is nearly as agonizing as watching Ella May struggle with her health. When these three factors come together, the book is simply unstoppable: "there are a few people that work to hurt, to hold down, to deny, to take from, to cheat the rest of us. And these few are the thieves of the body, the germs of the disease of greed, they are few but they are loud and strong." Guthrie died after composing hundreds of songs but only one novel. And as one-offs go, House of Earth is unforgettable.

Carol

December 10, 2018

Woody Guthrie's songs stir me, but I was amazed at how beautiful his novel is. His writing about what it's like to be a poor farmer in barren country in the 1930s is amazing. The wind sings in his words. This is a hymn to the land and the people who live on it.His characters, Tike and Ella May Hamlin, have poetry in their souls and only a shack to live in. They dream of building an adobe house that would keep out the wind, but the man who owns the land won't sell them what they need. Frustration burns them. But they love each other. Their words, especially Tike's, can be coarse, but they are lyrical course, they are real. Gurthrie's writing has made me care deeply about Tike, a person who I would shy away from in real life. If there is a "hillybilly elegy," this is it. And because it's written by Woody Guthrie, it's radical, it's full of anger and the rich and the capitalist system.There are intense sex scenes from the husband's perspective, but they are full of caring about Ella May's pleasure and trying as much as possible to ensure that she has it. The editors say that Guthrie, because he came from the people of Oklahoma, understood their language and their lives better than Steinbeck did and wrote about them even better than he did. I think that's true. I strongly recommend this book.

Heidi

May 02, 2022

Gutherie’s songs were fabulous. I was delighted that this novel was excellent as well. I am surprised though that it isn’t a better known title. Such a beautiful book written about the Dust Bowl during the Great Depression.

Bill

March 07, 2013

When I heard that Woody's single complete novel was finally being published, I couldn't wait to get my hands on it, and I couldn't have been more pleased with it. Much like Woody himself and his well-known musical offerings, this spare and beautiful tale and the characters it celebrates are simple and down-to-earth at the same time they are revolutionary and subversive. It's the story of Tike and Ella May Hamlin, a hard-working yet fun-loving pair of sharecroppers living in a shack in the Dust Bowl era Texas Panhandle. Tike has bought (for five cents) a government pamphlet describing how to build an adobe house, and this becomes the dream which drives their existence. The book is filled with Woody's beautiful, rambling prose and contains some spectacular descriptions of the desolate, yet beautiful landscapes of the Dust Bowl. Woody's dialog between Tike and Elly is among the most natural and flowing I've experienced. Also, the story opens with one of the longest and frankly hottest sex scenes I've ever read (and I've read lots of D. H. Lawrence!) But what's at the center of this story is the beautiful metaphor of the house built from the earth itself, a glowing reminder of our inextricable bond with the planet and each other.

Steve

February 24, 2013

This long-lost Woody Guthrie book tells part of the story of Tike and Ella May, living in what is not much more than a shack in the Texas panhandle during the dust bowl times, and dreaming of more. Their dream doesn't go an awful lot further than building an adobe house and owning an acre of land, but it seems that even that small dream is probably beyond their reach.There's not an awful lot of plot to the book, but that's OK, because its strengths make up for it. The two characters are really well-drawn and their love for one another (even if Tike has a wandering eye) is palpable. The first 30 pages of the book, in fact, tell of an erotic encounter between the two that is exciting and realistic. The other joy of the book is the language. I suspect some of Guthrie's language games are a side-effect of the disease he had which was getting worse by the time this book was written. Be that as it may, Guthrie has a love of language that really jumps off the page, and makes the characters all the more real.I'd give it 5 stars if it had more of a plot, and I may come back and do that later; we'll see how it lives in memory.

Jo

January 26, 2015

I didn't know what to expect when I opened this book. Sure, I know Guthrie's songs and music but I didn't know if his wonderful writing ability would extend to fiction. Fortunately, it did. This is very good storytelling. It's warm, tender, occasionally joyful, and shot through with humor. It is also infused with Guthrie's passion for justice and his hatred of the forces that belittle and undermine people who are trying to make a decent life for themselves. Guthrie uses Ella May and Tike as vehicles for his own anger, but this is no poorly-written piece of agit-prop. This is a sensitive portrait of a couple under enormous pressure.

georgia

March 12, 2013

234 pages written in 1947 This is a story of a couple who live in Oklahoma during the dust storms. Their struggles with life, yet have some fun. I found my self struggling with them, particularly when it was time for the birth of the kid. the house of earth is the adobe home where no termites live, dust can get in and the wind does not blow through the cracks. this couple dreams about building one on their own land.Woody Guthrie wrote a lot of folk songs, one of which is , this Land Is Your Land, pertaining to the poor people in the lower Midwest. i like it

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