THE FLAT PRAIRIE

Frederick Philip Grove (1879-1948) was born Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, East Prussia (now Poland), and grew up in Hamburg, Germany. He was educated at the University of Bonn but was imprisoned for fraud in 1903. After his release he fell into debt, and in 1909 he faked his suicide and fled to the United States. Three years later he moved to Canada and began working as a teacher at the Kronsfeld School in Haskett, Manitoba. He taught at seven different schools over the next seven years. He also earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Manitoba in 1922. He then served as principal of the Rapid City School until 1924, when he became a full-time writer. He published two collections of prairie essays, Over Prairie Trails (1922) and The Turn of the Year (1923), as well as a series of prairie novels, including Settlers of the Marsh (1925), A Search for America (1927), Our Daily Bread (1928), and The Yoke of Life (1930). While he is primarily known as a novelist today, he was more widely known as an essayist during his lifetime. In the summer 1939 issue, for example, Isabel Skelton praised 'the patient, thorough finish of his workmanship,' 'the fastidious rightness and accuracy of his words, phrases, and descriptions,' and 'the sensitive recording and discriminating of the delicately shaded moods of a solitary man.' The following essay was published in the July 1931 issue and included in the collection A Stranger to My Time (1986).
THE EXCEEDINGLY SLIGHT SLOPE with which the prairie south of Winnipeg drains, in a northeast direction, to the Red River is hardly perceptible; in truth, it amounts to less than [...]