Nancy A. Walker

Rachel Maddux

The dream of a green kingdom, a new world, a place to start over - this is the vision that compels the five central characters in this novel to seek a hidden land. The story is at once the age-old tale of utopia and dystopia and the saga of Americans at mid-century, with a history of economic depression, the midwestern dust bowl, and two world wars. First published in 1957, The Green Kingdom was Rachel Maddux's first novel, an ambitious undertaking that had occupied nearly twenty years of her life. Central to the novel is the act of creation - from naming the plants and animals of the kingdom to bearing children. Both Justin Magnus and Erma Herrick discover the wellsprings of their creative energy as they discover the kingdom and, finally, each other in a story that is by turns mystical and realistic, the product of a vivid imagination and keen powers of observation. The Green Kingdom itself is a metaphor for whatever circumstances can make a person feel some control over fate. To live in the Green Kingdom is to inhabit what Maddux calls "the climate of potentiality, " and to read The Green Kingdom is an intense experience in which we imagine our own responses to this land that Maddux so carefully delineates.

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