This Tender Land Study Guide

William Kent Krueger was born in Torrington, Wyoming, but his family moved frequently throughout his childhood. In the third grade, his teacher and parents praised one of Krueger’s stories, solidifying his dream of becoming a writer. Krueger briefly attended Stanford University in 1969, but he left in 1970 after the administration rescinded his academic scholarship for protesting the University’s complicity in the Vietnam War. Afterward, Krueger supported himself by logging timber, working construction, and writing freelance. It wasn’t until after he was married with children that he began to develop a personal writing discipline. At age 40, Krueger finished the manuscript of his first novel, Iron Lake (1998). The first in a series of 19 novels following Cork O’Connor, a biracial man of Ojibwe and Irish descent, Iron Lake won several awards, including the Minnesota Book Award and the Loft-McKnight Fiction Award. Since then, 13 of his novels have appeared on the New York Times bestseller list, including Ordinary Grace (2013) which received the Mystery Writers of America’s Edgar Award. Its companion novel, This Tender Land (2019), draws heavily on the plots of Homer’s Odyssey and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Krueger’s work emphasizes the importance of place, portraying a story’s setting as a character in its own right. He lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with his wife and children.

Lasting from 1929 to 1939, the Great Depression was a global economic crisis which resulted in widespread poverty and hardship in the United States. The Wall Street Crash of 1929, which refers to the significant drop in stock prices which occurred in autumn of that year, is largely recognized as the beginning of the Depression. The Great Depression hit American families and children particularly hard, with the United States Children’s Bureau estimating at least 25,000 families were homeless and wandering the country in 1932. Many families, like the Schofield family in This Tender Land, ended up living in shantytowns called “Hoovervilles” after President Herbert Hoover. The Bonus Army, to which the character Captain Bob Gray belongs, was a group of veterans and protesters who marched on Washington, D.C. in 1932 to demand compensation for their military service, which the federal government had promised to them. Meanwhile, by the early 1900s, American Indian residential schools were prevalent across the country. The purpose of these institutions was to forcefully assimilate Native American children into Anglo-American culture. Many of the children who lived in and attended such schools were taken from their birth families, who remained on reservations. The emotional, physical, and sexual abuse to which residential schools subjected children in the name of “education” is widely documented.

This Tender Land (2019) draws on both Homer’s Odyssey and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) for its narrative and mythological framework. Krueger’s standalone novel Ordinary Grace (2013) can be read as a companion to This Tender Land, similarly investigating the coming-of-age experience from a retrospective perspective. For another viewpoint on the abusive legacy of American reform schools, Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019) follows two Black boys struggling to survive an institution that has been designed to break their will. The Lincoln Highway (2021) by Amor Towles likewise explores the importance of camaraderie in the context of youth and exploitation. For a classic example of bildungsroman fiction, Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March (1953) presents a quintessential portrait of a young American boy chasing after self-exploration. Readers seeking a deeper dive into the experiences of Native American youth should read The Round House (2012) by Louise Erdrich, whose teenage protagonist grapples with injustice and the desire for revenge. Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1980 collection of stories Storyteller also focuses on the consequences of the systemic oppression of Native American people through the lens of nonfiction. Finally, for American historical fiction that uses adventure and mythology to examine issues of race and belonging, C Pam Zhang’s 2020 novel How Much of These Hills Is Gold explores the American gold rush from the perspective of two Chinese orphans searching for home.