Dust Jacket Information
Dustjacket Text from RUFUS AT THE DOOR & Other Stories by Jon Hassler
ONCE UPON A TIME, before Atheneum in New York took a chance on an unknown author and published Staggerford (1977), Jon Hassler wrote twenty-some short stories. He remembers exactly the day he began writing. It was September 1, 1970. He was thirty-seven years old and a teacher at Brainerd Community
College in central Minnesota. "I finished teaching my nine o'clock freshman English class and went to the library. I took out a notebook and pen, and began [my first] story."
Only a handful of these early stories ever made it into print (mostly in small
literary magazines), and Jon stored them away "in an old wooden filing cabinet I bought for $25 at a now-defunct department store in Brainerd."
That cabinet later accompanied Jon to Collegeville, Minnesota, where he was
writer-in-residence at St. John’s University for seventeen years, and to his current home in Minneapolis.
In 1999 the Afton Historical Society Press published seven of these stories in
KEEPSAKES & Other Stories to overwhelming public response. This companion
volume, RUFUS AT THE DOOR & Other Stories, brings to print seven more, beginning with the heart-wrenching tale of a good-natured, slow-witted man of about thirty-five named Rufus. Many of the characters in Jon's stories, including Rufus, are based on people he has known. You’ll find out which ones in the
Publisher’s Note preceding the stories.
SIX YEARS AGO, Jon Hassler was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. In a
holiday letter to Jon's friends in 1999, his best-known character, Agatha McGee, wrote that the novelist’s dreadful companion, Dr. Parkinson, "has begun to behave in cruel and irritating ways." This moving letter from Agatha appears at the end of this book as a postscript to Jon’s stories.
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