Jon Hassler – författare

At the age of eighty-eight, Agatha McGee has grudgingly moved out of her house on River Street and into the Sunset Senior Apartments. She’s not happy about giving up her independence, and Sunset Senior’s arts and crafts activities and weekly excursions to the Blue Sky Casino are hardly a consolation. Meanwhile two of her close friends pass away, her nephew Frederick is drifting into depression, and a kidnapped little girl has suddenly appeared on her doorstep. With characteristic poise and dignity, Agatha takes on her problems and finds that the bonds of friendship and family are still the key to happiness at any age. Affectionate and life-affirming, The New Woman is another delightful trip to a town with a soul as real as rural America itself.

In The Staggerford Murders, residents of the Ransford Hotel "solve" the nine- year-old murder of esteemed Staggerford citizen Neddy Nichols and the disappearance of his widow, Blanche. Hassler’s wry humor is in full force as this wonderful tale unfolds. In the more poignant and bittersweetThe Life and Death of Nancy Clancy’s Nephew, elderly W.D. Nestor finds his loneliness dispelled by his friendship with a young Staggerford boy, but it is a sudden visit to his one hundred-year-old Aunt Nancy that provides the peace he has always been looking for.

The memoir of a small-town childhood by one of Minnesota’s favorite writers, now published for the first timeI’ve always thought of the Red Owl Grocery Store in Plainview, Minnesota, as my training ground, for it was there that I acquired the latent qualities necessary to the novelist: from my dear German father, endurance, patience, resilience, and sound working habits, and from my dear Irish mother, the fun of picking individuals out of a crowd and the joy of finding the precise words to describe them. No one took more nourishment away from that store than I.

Beloved Minnesota novelist Jon Hassler, who chronicled small-town Midwestern life in such popular novels as Staggerford, A Green Journey, and North of Hope, left the manuscript for one important story unfinished when he died: his own. Days Like Smoke: A Minnesota Boyhood is Hassler’s previously unpublished memoir of his youth in rural Minnesota during the 1930s and 40s, giving us his memories and experiences through a writer’s acute and detailed observations. He remembers piano lessons, small-town secrets, his passion for movies, and his holy duties as the only altar boy at St. Joachim’s. 

He imagines how Sylvia Pofford spent the night of the prom that they did not attend together, and he recalls Miss Glaswitz, his unmarried neighbor “who kept . . . a neat, overfurnished house on Broadway, in each room of which was a glass-covered dish filled with hard candy,” who “surprised us all by selling it and marrying a cattle buyer from St. Paul.” With chapters organized by simple themes such as houses, lessons, and groceries, and ever attuned to the idiosyncrasies of the people around him, Hassler reviews his early years and occasionally reveals when a particular neighbor, teacher, or friend inspired a character or scene in his writing.

Will Weaver, another successful writer devoted to rural Minnesota, first met “Mister Hassler” as his older sister’s English teacher in Park Rapids. Weaver gently edited Hassler’s unfinished manuscript and contributed a moving foreword that gives readers biographical information about the author as well as describing the literary connections with his life and, above all, his empathy for the real residents and imagined characters of small-town Minnesota.