Minneapolis author Jon Hassler, whose stories, plays, and novels brought the fictional town of Staggerford, Minnesota, to vibrant life, has died. He would have been 75 on March 30th.
Last fall, MinnPost did a fabulous piece on Hassler’s continued efforts to write despite the crippling effects of a Parkinson’s-like disease that made typing his novels a Herculean task. His indomitable will and infectious and gentle humor shine through in that piece, and in his work.
Hassler’s milieu was small-town life and its institutions, but his canvas was the human soul. There’s a subtle satire to most of his novels, with playful and loving jabs at his characters’ foibles; he clearly loved his characters, and so do his readers. His characters’ concerns were often apparently small, but existentially large–the effort to find meaning and purpose may be expressed in apparently trivial ways, but Hassler never makes light of that effort. In the end, his theme both in literature and in life was human dignity.
[...] RIP, Jon Hassler. [...]