KILO

by Ellis Parker Butler

Kilo by Ellis Parker Butler is a humorous and lighthearted novel set in a small Midwestern town brimming with quirky characters and amusing situations. The story follows the arrival of a newcomer whose presence stirs up the quiet community, leading to unexpected friendships, rivalries, and comical misunderstandings. With sharp wit and a keen eye for human nature, Butler paints a charming portrait of small-town life, where gossip travels fast, and everyone knows each other's business. The novel is filled with playful satire, capturing the eccentricities of rural America while offering an affectionate look at its people. Through witty dialogue and lively storytelling, Kilo delivers a delightful reading experience, making it a timeless classic for fans of humor and Americana.

194 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1907

About the author

Ellis Parker Butler was an American author. He was the author of more than 30 books and more than 2,000 stories and essays. His career spanned more than forty years, and his stories, poems, and articles were published in more than 225 magazines.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ellis Parker Butler (1869-1937) was a contemporary of many big names in American fiction straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, but today he's almost completely forgotten. (Maybe that's because he was only a part-time writer with a day-job as a banker. His short bios at the University of Iowa Press and Des Moines Register are worth checking.)

This is the second book by Butler that I've read in the last month or so. I liked it better than the previous one and you might, too, in part because it contains no bothersome racial/ethnic stereotypes that might be objectionable for many modern readers. (Or at least none that I noticed.) And the humor in this one holds up pretty well; it's quite middle-American. It was originally published in 1907, but I read the Project Gutenberg e-book edition.

The plot centers around Eliph' Hewlitt, a travelling book salesman of the horse-and-buggy era, who is constantly pitching Jarby's Encyclopedia of Knowledge and Compendium of Literature, Science, Art, which is a thick, single-volume storehouse containing everything, as you can imagine. He arrives in Kilo, Iowa, during a church picnic and promptly runs across the girl of his dreams, Sally Briggs. He decides on the spot to marry her, and settles down in Kilo, peddling books to the locals. But Sally will have nothing to do with book agents, in part because she still owes for a previous edition of five volumes and can't get any more money from her cantankerous father for such frivolous items, so she avoids Eliph' assiduously...

The comic adventure involves a lot of fire-extinguishers, local graft, the newspaper printer, and various other people of importance in the tiny town. Along the way, we meet several amusing individuals to whom Eliph' is trying to sell his one-volume encyclopedia. My favorite vignette is a longish conversation about reincarnation and marriage and all that, between Hewlitt and the doctor's wife.

[Mark Rabideau · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a cute and silly tale. I listened to the Librivox version and the narration was excellent- but a word of caution you might fall asleep.