My grandfather dictated a number of oral histories shortly before he died and left a series of sketchy diaries of his education at Sul Ross University (then Sul Ross State Teachers' College) in Alpine, Texas. Many years later, I got interested in his life and went to Sul Ross University to the archives, where the librarians gave me countless oral interviews from the 1930s and documents about the Civilian Conservations Projects in the area, namely the establishment of Big Bend National Park and the Balmorhea State Park Swimming Pool. This ignited my interest in the 1930s Depression and the New Deal—how, in a very short time, the U.S. federal government established work relief programs to help thousands out of work.
I wrote...
The Wondrous Springs of Balmorhea: A Literary Chronicle of New Deal Days
When I first read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, I was moved by the story of the Joad family’s poverty and desperation, and the lack of sympathy they encountered when they arrived in California.
It is a very gritty description of their journey to California, and details how their dreams sour when they arrive, working as slaves for big orchard owners. This was the fate of thousands of farmers who fled the Dust Bowl.
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.
What I loved about Four Winds was the description of what happened in the Panhandle of Texas during the Dust Bowl before the family’s departure for California.
Even though I am from Texas, I was unaware of how pernicious the dust storms were and how they ruined the land and the farms. Many died from the accumulation of dust in their lungs. Farmers were victims of their own farming practices with regard to the soil and erosion, yet were resistant to help from the U.S, government to change those practices.
This novel tells the poignant story of one woman who married young into an Italian farming family, learns to love the land, but whose charming husband despairs and abandons her and their two children.
What makes this novel different is the descriptions of the Dust Bowl conditions for farmers, a realistic description of an Italian farming family, and the prejudice they encounter during the time period.
"The Bestselling Hardcover Novel of the Year."--Publishers Weekly
From the number-one bestselling author of The Nightingale and The Great Alone comes a powerful American epic about love and heroism and hope, set during the Great Depression, a time when the country was in crisis and at war with itself, when millions were out of work and even the land seemed to have turned against them.
“My land tells its story if you listen. The story of our family.”
Texas, 1921. A time of abundance. The Great War is over, the bounty of the land is plentiful, and America is on…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
What I loved about this nonfiction book is that it tells the history of the frontier West, farming practices, and the Dust Bowl in the style of a narrative, with details of towns and people that make the history come alive.
The book gave me a sense of the dire situation of small-time farmers, trying to eke out a living on barren land. Early frontier settlements were not regulated. Farmers were not aware of the importance of trees or the dangers of soil erosion. They were just trying to survive.
Egan’s description of “Black Sunday” in 1935, a huge dust storm that swept across the United States, which buried whole towns and caused hundreds of deaths from dust pneumonia, is chilling.
In a tour de force of historical reportage, Timothy Egan’s National Book Award–winning story rescues an iconic chapter of American history from the shadows.
The dust storms that terrorized the High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since. Following a dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, Timothy Egan tells of their desperate attempts to carry on through blinding black dust blizzards, crop failure, and the death of loved ones. Brilliantly capturing the terrifying drama of catastrophe, he does equal justice to the human characters…
What I loved about this novel was learning about the Lincoln Indian Training School in Minnesota, where Native Americans were taken from their parents for “re-education.” They were not allowed to speak their own language. Krueger’s descriptions of sexual abuse and violence against children are harrowing.
The novel tells the story of two white orphans, Odie and Albert, who are placed in a Native American school, and how they come to escape the cruelties of the headmistress, whom they call “The Black Witch.”
When Odie commits a terrible crime, Odie and Albert flee the school, taking with them two other orphans, Mose, a mute Sioux, and Emma, a young girl who has been adopted by the headmistress. They float down the river in a canoe, reminiscent of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
The novel is narrated as a yarn with plenty of hyperbole and melodrama, and there are many twists in the tale. But the descriptions of hoboes on trains, shantytowns, and the miserable circumstances of the Great Depression ring true historically.
1932, Minnesota-the Lincoln School is a pitiless place where hundreds of Native American children, forcibly separated from their parents, are sent to be educated. It is also home to an orphan named Odie O'Banion, a lively boy whose exploits earn him the superintendent's wrath. Forced to flee, he and his brother Albert, their best friend Mose, and a brokenhearted little girl named Emmy steal away in a canoe, heading for the mighty Mississippi and a place to call their own.
Over the course of one unforgettable summer, these four orphans will fly into the unknown and cross paths with others…
Two different families escape from the political tyranny of their respective homelands: the Josephsons from Sweden and Matias and Kurt Bauman, Jewish brothers from Germany and Austria-Hungary, with the aid of a Viennese opera diva, Sophie Augusta Rose, and Jean Guenoc, a former Jesuit priest, family friend, protector, and partisan…
What I loved about Listen was reading about the perspective of one character, who benefited from the Federal Writers’ Project, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal to help Americans during the Great Depression.
Liam doesn’t have a job and takes a job in a rural area in Oklahoma as part of the Federal Writers’ Project—his job is to listen to the stories of locals in the town and write them up as reports. The stories that Liam “collects” also give a reader a sense of how crushing the Great Depression was for many Americans.
An added twist to the story is when Liam meets Eden Sawyer, a talented young woman who is a largely self-taught artist, from a very poor family with an abusive father. They begin to meet secretly in the tower of the college in town, which is shaped like a medieval castle. She applies to study art at the college, but a male instructor in the art department is jealous of her work.
Russell introduces crime into this story, and then the novel becomes a “who-done-it.”
Stripped of opportunity by the Great Depression, educated and ambitious Liam takes a low-paying job with the Federal Writers' Project, assigned to collect stories of rural life for the Library of Congress in a hot, poverty-stricken Dust Bowl town in Oklahoma. He'll take his government check, write the stories, and wait for better times. Then Liam meets a woman who upends all his plans.
Eden Sawyer may be poor, but she's hardworking and determined. She has dreams; more than that, she has talent. As Liam interviews her, he discovers that Eden longs to be an…
The Wondrous Springs of Balmorhea focuses on the Balmorhea Civilian Conservation Corps camp in remote West Texas, part of Roosevelt’s New Deal program in 1935. It is 1976, and Sam McCabe looks back on that crucial year. Darlene, the sultry nurse, is the estranged wife of quack Dr. Brinkley, who killed many men with his goat testicle transplants.
Captain Bell, the commander, sidesteps federal dictates about segregation to protect the African American cook, Devilfish. E.O., the bookkeeper, is running a gambling ring while Jack, Sam’s best friend, is having a torrid affair with the nurse. Meanwhile, Sam befriends Chueco, a Mexican American boy who has escaped working in a mercury mine. Close to the big inauguration day for the pool, though, tragedy strikes.
At the Draydon Country Club, the summers are flawless—crisp tennis whites, cold martinis, and endless to-do lists. But behind every perfect summer is a story no one's telling.
Holly, fifty-one and newly divorced, is finally living life on her own terms—until a secret from her past threatens everything she's rebuilt. …
Charley Byrne isn’t really living. She hunkers down in her apartment above the bookstore she manages, until quirky activist Xander Wallace lures her out of social exile with the prospect of friendship and romance. Charley joins Xander’s circle of diverse friends and thrives, even leaving her comfort zone to join…
