The Wind Blows Free

by Frederick Manfred

From dust jacket "...The Wind Blows Free, a personal reminiscence of a 1934 hitchniking trek from Doon, Iowa, to the shining Western mountains, is a trip which the author said 'released his soul.' It is an odyssey of the outsetting novelist, an adventure into some of the beginnings of Frederick Manfred's art. For that reason alone The Wind Blows Free is an important book. But it is also a rich and wonderfully humorous account, a moving picture of the young artist, in which Manfred sits (that's too quiescent a term somehow) for his own portrait. In Vivian, South Dakota, a dust-bowl town of boardwalks and moaning winds, youthful Frederick Feikema Manfred meets Minerva Baxter enroute West with her 1926 Essex and her spinster's phobias. As a condition for his becoming her passenger-driver he must stand for a portrait - this time a chalk outline of his six-foot, nine-inch frame to be drawn by an attendant on a gas-station wall as Miss Minerva's precaution against any criminal ardor latent in the young man. Examining the great human map which results, she pronounces it satisfactory and say it's time to be on their way...."

255 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1979

About the author

Manfred's novels are very much connected to his native region. His stories involve the American Midlands, and the prairies of the West. He named the area where the borders of Minnesota, Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska meet, "Siouxland."
(wikipedia)

Reviews

[larry l. jerke · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like his writing style. A little geography lesson and conversation w new friends.

[Jennifer Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've enjoyed reading this book so much that I've read it twice since happening upon it a few years ago at a book sale. What a writer! Next up by this author is "The Golden Bowl".