Goodbye to Main Street, a family memoir and sequel to Prairie Son, is one journey divided into two parts. The first half of Goodbye to Main Street is set in the small prairie town where Dennis M. Clausen, the author and narrator, grew up. It depicts the lives of his original family in the middle of the last century after his parents were divorced. It also describes how his father Lloyd Clausen struggled with relationships and wandered into and out of his life, as his mother put it, "still searching for a place where he fit in." His father seemed to be deeply troubled by things that happened to him earlier in his life, but was reluctant to talk about them. Clausen's mother had more obvious challenges to overcome. She had contacted an unusual disease in her infancy that had destroyed her right hip and shortened her left leg. Sitting was difficult for her, and walking for any distance was impossible. The second half of Goodbye to Main Street is triggered by family mysteries connected to the legacy of previous generations that had shaped the emotional lives of his mother and father. These mysteries, first explored in Prairie Son, motivated Clausen to complete his father's journey by researching and connecting with Lloyd's biological family in ways his father was never able to do. Through these and other sources, Clausen began to find answers to the many unanswered questions in his family history. Who was his biological grandfather, the man he only knew through a faded photograph of a young man in a wrestling pose? Why did his biological grandmother keep her child (his father) hidden on the family farm for several months before giving him up for adoption? Why did his father have three different names before he was one-year old? Who was the mysterious "Aunt" Delores, another adopted child and his father's most enduring love, who occasionally appeared in the author's life? Was his father's failure to develop lasting relationships the result of his early childhood experiences in his adoptive parents' home? By researching and connecting with his biological relatives who shared the same ancestral "roots," Clausen completed his father's journey and learned the circumstances that compelled Lloyd's birth mother to give her child up for adoption. In the process, he exposed the actions of previous generations that had shaped his family history, including the tragic events that had destroyed his mother's hip and leg-and who might have been responsible for it. Goodbye to Main Street is also the sequel to Prairie Son (1999), the recipient of the 1997 First Series Award for Creative Nonfiction. After Prairie Son was published, Clausen was contacted by members of other families who experienced similar adoptions in their histories. While interacting with these families, Clausen realized the practice of adopting children to be workers was far more common than he had previously thought. Like his father, these children who were adopted to labor in their adoptive homes struggled later in life with relationships and feelings of never truly belonging anywhere. In time, Clausen came to realize this was his father's story-and the one he chronicles during his own journey through the pages of Goodbye to Main Street.
About the Author: Dennis M. Clausen is a professor of American literature and screenwriting at the University of San Diego. He is also a former newspaper columnist and author of both fiction and nonfiction books. Goodbye to Main Street, the result of almost two decades of research into his ancestral past, is both a family memoir and sequel to Prairie Son (1999). Prairie Son, the story of his father's early life as a boy who was adopted by a farm family to be a worker and not a son, is an award-winning work of creative nonfiction that has been taught in many schools and colleges. It was also nominated for several national literary awards and was voted one of the five most important books published in 1999 by a University of Minnesota graduate. The St. Paul Pioneer Press review of the book stated, "Have you ever read a book so good you don't want it to end. Prairie Son will make you feel that way." Publisher's Weekly described the book as "an archetypical account of Depression-era hardship," and Foreword Magazine described Prairie Son as "Truly memorable...The almost atonal language typical of the time takes on a rich descriptive quality that makes this text deeply lyrical as well as historical. Outstanding." The Accountant's Apprentice, a novel that combines several literary genres, was a finalist in the Cygnus Awards Competition. His other published works include Screenwriting and Literature (2009), a book published by Kendall-Hunt that explores the relationships between screenwriting and novel writing. Bantam Books published Ghost Lover (1982), a best-selling mystery/ thriller paperback that received strong reviews in many publications nationwide. Publisher's Weekly concluded its review of the novel with the statement, "This expertly written thriller, a kind of Stephen King- Ross Macdonald hybrid (and in a class with either) beautifully evokes the feeling of a small town dying-its buildings, its streets and, most of all, its lost souls."