House of Earth follows the lives of two farmers, Tike and Ella May Hamlin, husband and wife, who live in the Texas Panhandle in the 1930s. They live a hard life in a flimsy shack, yet exist with extreme (and fraught) vitality. Their wooden house can't keep out the elements, so Tike--Guthrie's alter ego--espouses the gospel of adobe. Everywhere he goes, he carries a five-cent government pamphlet, a how-to manual that teaches poor, rural people how to build an adobe dwelling from the cellar up. Homes made from the land itself--fireproof, windproof, Dust-Bowl proof--houses of earth.

I'll grab some mud and you grab some clay
So when it rains it won't wash away.
We'll build a house that'll be so strong,
The winds will sing my baby a song.

On the dirt farm, life persists, and Tike and Ella May make love in a scene worthy of D.H. Lawrence. The intimate descriptions serve a purpose, and Guthrie elevates the biological act to a representation of Tike and Ella May's oneness with the land, the farm, and each other. And yet, the land is not the Hamlins' to do with as they please--and so the building of their adobe house remains painfully out of reach. What could be simpler than making a home from bricks, and bricks from dirt? And what could be a more insidious obstacle to that dream than not owning the land on which you live and work? This is what Tike and Ella May combat and how this book makes a direct and forceful statement.

In many ways, House of Earth, originally handwritten in a Steno notebook, is a companion piece to "This Land Is Your Land." The novel falls somewhere between rural realism and proletariat protest to produce a vivid and moving portrait of the Texas Panhandle and the marginalized folk who made a life there in the 1930s.