A best-of collection by Homer Croy, Missouri’s prize-winning humorist, the United State’s first student of journalism, and the world’s first novelist to film his way around the globe.
One part Mark Twain, and two parts Garrison Keillor, award-winning humorist and essayist Homer Croy was a man of many distinctions: “The first student of the first school of journalism in the United States,” “the first person to tour the world shooting motion pictures,” and the first author of his day to write a best-selling novel that happened to be anonymous.
Dale Carnegie dedicated his opus “How to Win Friends and Influence People” to him; Will Rogers, for whom Croy wrote more films than any other, made him the honored guest at his Thanksgiving table. In between his pioneering studies in journalism at the University of Missouri and his mid-life, Missouri farm memoirs that sold in the hundreds of thousands, Croy flunked out of college, moved to the Big Apple, filmed his way around the world, tied the knot in the first marriage ever captured on a Universal newsreel, worked for Theodore Dreiser, earned a fortune, moved to Paris, tragically lost two children, wrote for Hollywood, earned an honorary doctorate, and, in the end, lost his fortune—all while maintaining the down-home humor and heart that earned him a reputation among peers as “the towering cornstalk” of midcentury, midwestern memoir.
Homer Croy: Corn Country was reviewed in the Iowa Historical Society’s
Editor, ZACHARY MICHAEL JACK who has published more than twenty award-winning books in a variety of genres, including fiction, poetry, literary journalism, creative nonfiction, and personal essay. Zachary’s fiction has earned national runner-up honors in its class in the Foreword Reviews Book of the Year Award; his poetry has been awarded the Prentice Hall Prize, and his nonfiction has received nominations for the Pushcart (Best of the Small Presses) Prize, the Theodore Saloutos Award, the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award, the Herbert Warren Wind Award, and the Shambaugh Award. The author and his work have been featured in USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Indianapolis Star, and the Des Moines Register, among many others. Zachary’s books have been favorably reviewed by the The New York Review of Books, Publishers’ Weekly, Choice, Kirkus, Foreword Reviews, and countless other industry-leading opinion-makers.