This Farm For Sale by Jesse Stuart, 1946
The magic trick:
Pinning the story’s success on a believably special newspaper article within the plot
Fairly high degree of difficulty here in today’s J-Stu story.
He’s got a great premise. But the plot hinges on the quality of a newspaper article one of the characters in the story writes. And the only way to really make that clear is to let the reader read the entire article as part of the story.
So, yeah, that article within the story had better be special, right? The story falls flat if it isn’t.
No worries here. He pulls it off with ease.
And that’s quite a trick on Stuart’s part.
The selection:
“My farm comes to this river,” Uncle Dick said. “I’ve often thought what a difference it would be if we had a bridge across this river. Then I could reach the Tiber road and go east to Blakesburg and west to Darter City. But we don’t have a bridge; and until we go down the river seven miles to Red Hot where we can cross to the Tiber road, we’ll always be in the mud. I’ve heard all my life that the country would build a bridge. My father heard it, too, in his lifetime.”
“You are shut in here,” Melvin Spencer agreed, as he looked beyond the Tiber River at the road.
“Now, we’ll go to the house and get some dinner,” Uncle Dick said. “Then I’ll take you up on the hill this afternoon and show you my timber and the rest of the farm.”
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