Time of Man, The

Time of Man, The, novel by Elizabeth M. Roberts. published in 1926.

During her childhood, Ellen Chesser wanders with her parents through Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia, while her restless father seeks work as a farmhand or sharecropper. She grows up barefooted and ill‐fed, working in the fields and feeling an intimate relation with things of earth. When the family finally settles in one place, Ellen falls in love with Jasper Kent, a fellow worker. Although he leaves temporarily, to escape punishment for accidentally burning a barn, he returns to marry her. Ellen bears children, they try sharecropping, and then Jasper returns to his former employer, Joe Phillips. Jasper and Ellen quarrel over his interest in Hester Shuck and Joe's in Ellen, but they are reconciled by the birth and early death of their fifth child. They become more prosperous, and hope to buy the farm they are working, but a neighbor's barn burns, and rumors of the old accusation against Jasper lead a group of rioters to drive them away. Once more Ellen packs her belongings in a wagon, headed, as she tells her children, “somewheres….”