Three Farmers on Their Way To a Dance Summary

Richard Powers


(Masterpieces of American Literature)

In the first chapter of Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, the first-person narrator happens upon a haunting August Sander photograph in the Detroit Institute of Arts while passing some hours between trains. The photograph captures three youthful peasants resplendent in weekend finery. The picture, bearing the same title as Powers’s book, is dated 1914. Given that date, the narrator reads his own meaning into the title: The dance these rural Americans are destined for is World War I.

The first narrative frame of the novel recounts the narrator’s search for basic information about the picture and, once he has gained it, about the people Sander’s lens captured. It turns out that all three—Hubert, Adolphe, and Peter—died in the war.

Yet Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance is about much more than three peasants united in an obscure photograph. The book recounts in some detail the birth of twentieth century modernism and the virtually unbelievable interconnectedness of all human events. In order to fix the story historically, Powers provides readers with recurring interchapters, all related in some way to his skillful development of the book’s three major plots.

Several historical interchapters deal with the impact Henry Ford had upon American life and culture. Powers includes an interchapter on Ford’s unofficial diplomatic efforts to end World War I by chartering an ocean liner and sailing it to Norway with as many...

(The entire section is 609 words.)