Sticker residue on cover Little brown and Company, 1971, 224 pages Set in the Middle America Inge knows so well, MY SON IS A SPLENDID DRIVER chronicles the Hansen family of Freedom, Kansas: the small children, Grace and Joey; Treva, their flirtatious, expensively inclined sister; handsome independent Jule; Brian, the traveling salesman father; and domineering Bess, adoring her children, relegating her husband to the merely tolerated role of breadwinner. We meet them one idyllic summer in 1919 touring to Colorado with Jule, the adored son, at the wheel — "My son is a splendid driver" — and we follow them, growing and aging through succeeding decades, in an experience of life that lies deep in the American grain. “There was never any thought of Death in the days I have been writing about," Joey tells us. "We all lived with the fancy that, whereas Death certainly happened to others, something would just as certainly spare us from ever facing it; and our days on earth would be filled with happiness." But death must come, even to the Hansens.