Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, agricultural industry changes, and bank foreclosures forcing tenant farmers out of work. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they are trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California along with thousands of other "Okies" seeking jobs, land, dignity, and a future....

The Great Depression has hit West Virginia hard. Men are out of work; women struggle to feed hungry children. Luckily, Nurse Becky Myers has returned to care for them. While she can handle most situations, Becky is still uneasy helping women deliver their babies. For these mothers-to-be, she relies on an experienced midwife, her dear friend Patience Murphy. Though she is happy to be back in Hope River, time and experience have tempered Becky's cheerfulness,...

Late one night in August 1934, following a yearlong spree of bank robberies across the Midwest, Jason and Whit Fireson are forced into a police shootout and die...for the first time.Now it appears that the bank robbers known as the Firefly Brothers by an admiring public have at last met their end in a hail of bullets. Jason and Whit's lovers-Darcy, a wealthy socialite, and Veronica, a hardened survivor-struggle between grief and an unyielding belief...

Pulitzer prize-winner author of All Over but the Shoutin', Rick Bragg builds a monument to his grandfather Charlie Bundrum. Known for being a passionate family man with a special talent for living and surviving, Bundrum was a master roofer, carpenter, whiskey-maker, fisherman, banjo player, and buck dancer. Unable to read, he asked his wife Ava to read him the newspaper every night so he would not be ignorant. Set in the Great Depression, Bundrum's...

Twelve-year-old Abilene Tucker is the daughter of a drifter who, in the summer of 1936, sends her to stay with an old friend in Manifest, Kansas, where he grew up, and where she hopes to find out some things about his past. Over the summer she pieces together his story. Having heard stories about Manifest, Abilene is disappointed to find that it's just a dried-up, worn-out old town. But her disappointment quickly turns to excitement when she discovers...

A black family living in the South during the 1930's are faced with prejudice and discrimination which their children don't understand.

An intimate portrait of a uniquely independent woman who finds herself newly divorced during the Depression years and struggles to carve out a new life for herself and her family. The story explores Mildred's unreasonable devotion to her insatiable daughter Veda, as well as the complex relationship she shares with the indolent men in her life, including her polo-playing lover Monty Beragon and ex-husband Bert Pierce.

"In the early 1920s, Benjamin Roth was a young lawyer fresh out of the army. He settled in Youngstown, Ohio, a booming Midwestern industrial town. Times were good - until the stock market crash of 1929. After nearly two years of economic crisis, it was clear that the heady prosperity of the Roaring Twenties would not return quickly." "As Roth began to grasp the magnitude of what had happened to American economic life, he set out to record his impressions...

Eighteen-year-old Eliza Mirk is the anonymous creator of Monstrous Sea, a wildly popular webcomic, but when a new boy at school tempts her to live a life offline, everything she's worked for begins to crumble.

Presents a selection of letters written to Tom Brokaw in response to his book "The Greatest Generation," in which he examines the lives and experiences of the men and women of the Depression and World War II era who Brokaw credits with building modern America.