LeRoy MacLeod — Driven

LeRoy MacLeod carried the farms of Browns Valley through several lives: newspaper reporter, Los Angeles advertising partner, poet, Midwestern novelist, public-utility executive, victory-garden organizer, daylily breeder, and tireless newspaper correspondent. He began writing verse in 1924, and Driven appeared in New York and London five years later. Its short farm poems have the hard weather and bodily pressure that made the English poet Robert Nichols hear a Hardy-like quality in him; at its center is “Drouth,” where heat, work, family grievance, and the need to escape gather into a single rural tragedy. MacLeod soon turned mainly to fiction, publishing Three Steeples, The Years of Peace, and The Crowded Hill. He returned to poetry late with A Lover’s Album (1977), a scarce thirty-five-page book unavailable for this edition. The present volume resets the complete 1929 collection and adds “The Wall” from The Lyric West, following the original order, stanza divisions, and internal sequences while correcting clear typographical and OCR damage.