Jon Hassler

After twenty years in the priesthood, Father Frank Healy returns home to minister to the Ojibway Indians living on the Basswood Reservation and meets again the only woman who ever tempted him away from his service to God, badly in need of a friend and counselor.

Agatha McGee, a tower of strength as Miles Pruitt's surrogate mother/landlady in Staggerford, takes the spotlight here. I like this old lady. How can anyone not like this feisty, intelligent, honorable, quick witted, reactionary-but-progressive, hot-tempered, indignant, pragmatic, nurturing old lady? This novel, like it's sequel Dear James, is very warm. There are certain writers that you can depend on to make you relax and smile. Jon Hassler, like...

The academic life, starring professor Leland Edwards, a man in his fifties who lives with his mother. While infighting with the other profs, Edwards pines for his divorced wife, grieves for his dead son and battles a sexual harassment suit. A character study by the author of Rookery Blues.

In 1944, the Foster family members move to Plum, Minnesota, to start a supermarket, but first they have to overcome the townspeople's prejudice against outsiders.

Publisher description: In the spring of 1975, an unknown Minnesota teacher named Jon Hassler decided to take a sabbatical and fulfill his lifelong dream of writing a novel. A year later, Hassler typed the final page of Staggerford--a book that has won a cherished place as a classic novel of small-town life in America. Now, many years and many novels later, Hassler shares the private story of Staggerford's creation as recorded in the vividly revealing...

ONCE UPON A TIME, before Atheneum in New York took a chance on an unknown author and published "Staggerford" (1977), Jon Hassler wrote a number of short stories that introduce many of the characters in his later novels. Only a handful of these stories had appeared in print (mostly in small literary magazines) until Afton Historical Society Press published the best-selling RUFUS AT THE DOOR and KEEPSAKES. -- Publisher's description.