Wheatyard

Wheatyard is the story of the enigmatic, unpublished writer Elmer Glaciers Wheatyard and the unnamed narrator, a business school graduate stuck in an Illinois college town, jobless, after graduation, who improbably befriends him. During the course of a summer the two circle each other, with Wheatyard eager to exert his authority yet wary of revealing his personal life while the narrator struggles to focus on launching his finance career but finds himself distracted and passively fascinated by the writer. Though at first polar opposites, they gradually yield their idealistic extremes and arrive at a common ground that will better position themselves for the rest of their lives. Wheatyard meditates on art versus commerce, idealism versus pragmatism, and independence versus survival, as it reveals the lives of two very different people who have more in common than they realize, and also celebrates the subtle beauty of the rural Midwest.