Prairie Son

Prairie Son is the true story of a boy who was adopted out of an orphanage in the early 1920's and raised on a Midwestern farm to be more of a worker than a son for his adoptive family. The story is told through the point of view of Lloyd Clausen, the author’s father. Lloyd survived the Great Depression, drought years, and spirit-crushing poverty. On his adoptive parents’ farm, Lloyd was denied basic dental care, an education, decent clothing except for what he bought with his own trapping money, and support for his emerging singing talents. He was also left at home or on the shore when other fathers took their sons fishing or to community outings. When his adoptive mother made it clear that she did not even want him around, the parental void in Lloyd’s life was filled by a hired man and a huge police dog named Buster. Ivar, the hired man, taught Lloyd the many skills he would need to survive later in life, and Buster was his constant companion and protector. Delores, another adopted child who lived on a neighboring farm and had a mysterious past, was his other companion and protector. The friendship the two adopted children shared eventually turned into youthful, adolescent love until fate separated them. Yet, Lloyd survived and eventually located his biological parents through a series of extraordinary coincidences and the assistance of others who sympathized with his plight and helped him find his ancestral roots. When Prairie Son was first published in 1999, it became somewhat of a national, statewide, and regional publishing sensation. Dave Woods, Past Vice-President of the National Book Critics Circle, wrote that Prairie Son, the winner of the 1999 First Series Creative Nonfiction Award, attracted “all manner of national attention, a consummation devoutly to be wished for by a small publisher.” Prairie Son was also nominated for several national book awards, and the University of Minnesota voted it one of the five most favorite books published in 1999 by a University of Minnesota alumnus. Since it was first published in 1999, Prairie Son has become a voice for many other children who were adopted to be workers and later struggled during their adult years with the legacy of those early life experiences. Goodbye to Main Street, a recently published sequel to Prairie Son, chronicles Lloyd Clausen’s son’s quest to answer the lingering questions still remaining in his family history and the people who made his own life possible.