American Tapestry

American Tapestry: The Poetry of Main Street is the final book in a unique, multi-genre trilogy author Dennis M. Clausen started writing in the early 1980s and completed almost four decades later. Prairie Son (1999), a work of creative nonfiction and the first book in the trilogy, is the story of the author's father, Lloyd Clausen, who was adopted in the early 1920s to be a farm worker and not a son. Prairie Son also chronicles his father's search for his birth parents during the Great Depression. The book received considerable national attention for the spotlight it placed on the practice of adopting children to be workers and not sons or daughters in their adoptive homes. Goodbye to Main Street (2016), the second book in the trilogy, is a "Family Memoir and Sequel to Prairie Son" in which author Clausen narrates his own efforts to complete his father's search for his biological parents and their descendants. American Tapestry, a book of poems about small town characters in the middle of the last century, completes this multi-genre trilogy. Many of these poems were inspired by people Clausen knew and wrote about in Prairie Son and Goodbye to Main Street. Others are characters who could be found in any small town earlier in our nation's history.