[In the following essay, Rae praises Pyle's depiction of the diversity of American life in Home Country.]

Before he left on his last journey to the Pacific, Ernie Pyle said to his publishers: "I hope some day you people will publish the book of mine that I like best myself. That's the book with all the stuff I wrote before the war, the book about my own country. About home. I think that's the best writing I've ever done."

Home Country is that book. It tells the story of five years of wandering across the continent, and throughout its pages the gentle spirit and keen perceptions of the author are constantly manifest. It combines autobiography with topical comment. It is full of folklore and Americana. With a simple approach Pyle at times becomes impressive in his descriptive passages, but he seems most at home when writing about people—the odd types which he seemed to find in every State he visited.

The prairie winds sweep through the book. The desert dust clings to the pages. The deadness of Death Valley is invoked in a few telling strokes. The majesty of Glacier Park, the tumbling icy streams of the Northwest, the desolation of the drought bowl, all fall into focus in the framework of Pyle's simple prose. The book has a nomadic sweep, but the author's zest for picturesque detail gives it a homely flavor.

In specific terms Pyle crossed the country twenty times, visited every State in the Union at least three times, and every country in the Western Hemisphere except two, stayed in more than 800 hotels, flew in 66 airplanes, traveled in 29 ships and in five years turned out enough daily columns to fill twenty books. He did not have a Christmas at home in four years. He spent one Fourth of July in hipboots, sheepskin coat, mittens and stocking cap. The steepest hill he ever climbed was on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec, and it was "like driving up over the roof of a barn." The most frightening road he ever traveled was a mountain trail in Idaho, right after a cloud-burst. It was the width of a car, and hung over an abyss. The outside was caving off in washouts; the inside was banked up with landslides.

Pyle found Oklahoma one of the friendliest States in the Union. He came to the conclusion that the people of Portland, Oregon, "mixed their New England soundness with a capacity for living the freer, milder Northwest way, and it made a pretty highclass combination." He found western Kansas in the middle Nineteen Thirties the saddest land he had ever seen. He wrote of its terrific desolation:

Following the horizon around, as you sometimes gaze out from a ship at sea, I saw not a solitary thing but bare earth, and a few lonely, empty farmhouses. As far as the eye could see there was not a tree, or a blade of grass, or a fence, or a field; not a flower or a stalk of corn, or a dog or a cow, or a human being—nothing at all but gray raw earth and a few farmhouses and barns, sticking up like white cattle skeletons on the desert. There was nobody in the houses; the people had given up and gone. It was death, if I have ever seen death.

He drove nearly 2,000 miles around the drought bowl in 1936, and in that same year ran into a grasshopper plague in South Dakota. He fled from the snakes in the cactus country and failed to find freaks in Santa Fe. "They all must have been out picking huckleberries," he commented. "All the writers and artists seemed to be as fine people as you'd ever wish to see—intelligent, serious, good."

In Memphis he talked to Sim Webb, the Negro fireman who rode the cab with Casey Jones. He was the first man to be shaved by Alaska's woman barber—in the town of Platinum. In Idaho he learned from a one-armed man how to roll his cigarettes with one hand. He journeyed to Four Corners, to stand on the spot where Colorado, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico all touch one another briefly. He visited George Washington Carver at Tuskegee and brought happiness to William Andrew Jackson, an old exslave in Knoxville, who was received by President Roosevelt as the result of a column written about him by Pyle. He flew 16,000 feet over the Andes, visited the Central American ruins, ate guinea pig in Peru and iguana in Guatemala and went through an earthquake in Nicaragua. One of the best sections of the book is devoted to the leper colony at Molokai, which Pyle was permitted to visit. With his usual close attention to detail, he gives a clear and moving picture of life among the lepers.

In this, the last of his books, there are glimpses of Pyle's early life at Dana, Ind. He worked "like a horse from the time he was nine." His father was a farmer, carpenter and handy man. His mother was the best chicken raiser and cake baker in the neighborhood. She would rather stay at home and milk the cows than go to the State Fair. She was a devout Methodist, a prohibitionist and had quite a temper. Among Ernie's strongest recollections of his farming days was the summer wind in the Midwest—"one of the most melancholy things in all life, it comes from so far and blows so gently and yet so relentlessly."

He first saw Washington in the soft spring of 1923 and walked with the world ahead of him that day. After trying Washington and New York, he came to the conclusion that Washington had the "personal liberty of that most cosmopolitan of all cities, New York, without its cruelty and lonesomeness."

Ernie Pyle lies in Ie. But his voice, with its old beguiling note, is heard through the pages of Home Country.