Johnny Depp Read A Woody Guthrie Novel
Yes, Woody Guthrie (pictured) wrote a novel, and it’s just been published with an intro by Douglas Brinkley and Johnny Depp. (What? Not James Franco?) Larry McMurtry considers the book in the New York Review of Books: ‘”House of Earth” was completed in 1947 but discovered only recently. It is a novel about farming; there aren’t many such. The one great one, Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds, was reprinted not long ago by the persistent professor Matthew J. Bruccoli, who was given it by an astute bookseller. It’s a great book, and House of Earth isn’t, though it is powerful. It’s a serious effort to dramatize the struggles of a young couple, Tike and Ella May Hamlin, who try to make a living as farm laborers in the most unforgiving years of an equally unforgiving place: the Texas Panhandle in the 1930s.’
