Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance

National Book Award-winner Richard Powers’s debut novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (1985), follows a narrator identified only as “P” as he becomes obsessed with an August Sander photograph displayed in the Detroit Institute of Arts. This obsession opens a vista onto the history of World War I, the meaning of photography, and the birth of modernism. Meanwhile, Peter Mays, a copyeditor, develops an obsession of his own with a red-headed actress, which leads him to Sander’s photograph.

The novel opens as the first-person narrator—whose surname begins with “P”—finds himself stranded for a few hours in Detroit between trains. He takes himself to the Detroit Institute of Arts, where he encounters a photograph entitled “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.” It shows three young men making their way down a rural road in their best clothes. The photograph is dated 1914, and this information causes P to interpret the title afresh. The “dance” these young men are headed for is World War I.

P finds himself unable to forget this photograph. He begins to research it, learning that pioneering photographer August Sander took it as part of an uncompleted attempt to document all the “People of the 20th Century.” The young farmers of the photograph are German.



When he has learned all the factual information he can about the photograph itself, P’s obsession broadens. It drives him to try to identify the three farmers of the photograph. He learns their names (Hubert, Adolphe, and Peter), and he also learns that all three died in World War I. P sets off in search of their descendants.

Meanwhile, P begins to think and read about photography, producing academic essays on the subject that are interspersed through the main narrative. The focus of P’s thinking is the German theorist Walter Benjamin, for whom the “mechanical reproduction” of photography is the defining process of the industrial era. This insight leads P to broader and broader reflections on 20th-century history, including a lengthy digression about Henry Ford, the man who pioneered mechanical reproduction as an industrial strategy. P narrates Ford’s attempt to end World War I by packing an ocean liner with celebrities and prominent businessmen and sailing it to Europe, in the hope that they could negotiate peace where politicians had failed.

Another focus is the actor Sarah Bernhardt, who pioneered acting for the movies (another form of mechanical reproduction). This digression intersects with the novel’s subplot concerning a copyeditor named Peter Mays, who works for a computer magazine.



One day, Mays spots a haunting red-headed beauty in a Boston crowd and is moved to follow her. When they meet, he learns that she is an actor currently starring as Sarah Bernhardt in a one-woman show. To secure her affection, Mays embroils himself in a picaresque quest which eventually leads him to “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.” Mays is one of the farmers’ descendants, and the novel’s conclusion brings him and P together.