When I was a boy of eight in the Platte Valley of Nebraska, my father made the first of the many moves that would prove to be of interest to a future writer of fiction. They were east to Chicago, the point on the map where all the lines pointed. Almost twenty years would pass before I would seek to recapture the past that I had experienced."The Works of Love"is the first fruit of that effort, and the linchpin in my novels concerned with the plains. The reader who has read "The Home Place" or "The Field of Vision" will find in this novel the crux of an experience I frequently return to but never exhaust."--Wright Morris