Akron Public Library

The story of a farm family's Depression-era journey from the Dustbowl of Oklahoma to the California migrant labor camps in search of a better life.

Struggling to uphold her faith and her family at the height of the Great Depression, Lanie dreams of becoming a writer, but her dreams are shattered when her father is diagnosed with cancer and a new crisis rocks the town Fairhope.

A previously honest boat owner, Harry Morgan, is reduced to smuggling to keep his crumbling family financially alive. He enters a world of wealth and dissipation, then becomes involved in a strange and unlikely romance.

The Great Depression and a strike at the grainmill greatly changes Virginia's life and outlook as her physician father begins to work with the unemployed and the strikers.

Lanie Freeman had to grow up fast. Her mother died when she was just fourteen and now her father is in prison. The oldest of five children, seventeen-year-old Lanie has transformed into a surrogate mother Œ́ and a beautiful young woman. Not only must she keep her family together, but lately she has drawn the attention of Roger Langley, son of the richest man in town. Tensions run deep between the Freemans and the Langleys. And on top of it all,...

The Great Depression brought hard times. Two young lovers' Claude and Myra' set out to get rich quick. Being good comes easy to some' but the trick to being bad is living to spend the loot. Along the back roads and byways of America' this star-crossed pair will become as famous as Bonnie and Clyde--if lawmen in three states and a Dallas road gang don't get them first. The rain stopped and the stock market crashed' but dreams can still come true ....

Emma Trimpany is just seventeen when she assists at the harrowing birth of the Dionne quintuplets: five tiny miracles born to French farmers in hardscrabble Northern Ontario in 1934. Emma cares for them through their perilous first days, and when the government removes the babies from their francophone parents, making them wards of the British king, Emma signs on as their nurse. Over six thousand daily visitors come to ogle the identical "Quints"...

Since the Big Bubble popped in 1929, life in the United States hasn't been the same. Hotshot wizards will tell you nothing's really changed, but then again, hotshot wizards aren't looking for honest work in Enid, Oklahoma. No paying jobs at the mill, because zombies will work for nothing. The diner on Main Street is seeing hard times as well, because a lot fewer folks can afford to fly carpets in from miles away. Jack Spivey's just another down-and-out...

Mama Fela, a skilled seamstress, is the aging matriarch of the Romero clan in Santa Lucia, a small town in northeastern New Mexico at the height of the Great Depression. Her six-year-old granddaughter and constant companion, Cipriana, delights in the Shirley Temple movies that occasionally come to the town's theater. Through Cipriana's eyes, we see her parents' struggles over money. Graciela, Cipriana's mother, is a teacher in a rural school system...

"Beatrice Carraway has dreams. Although she's aged out of the childhood pageant circuit, she's intent on carrying her talents all the way to the big screen--if only she can escape the poverty of West Dallas first. But as the Great Depression drags the working class further and further under, Beatrice struggles just to keep herself, her mother, and her younger sister afloat. After a string of failed auditions, she feels defeated. And then in walks...