Great Depression History

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When the New Deal Came to Town is a snapshot of a time and place: Whiteland, Indiana during the Great Depression, one of the most fraught eras in American history. Imagine yourself transported back in time to April of 1933 and deposited in a small American town, when a young boy named George Melloan moved with his family to this quiet hamlet during the middle of the worst economic period in American history.

Among America’s most infamous “public enemies” and, perhaps, the most unique and controversial was Kate Barker. With her prominent, hawk-tipped nose and plump, doughy face, framed by a classic dark, curly coif and frilly day dresses to match, Ma Barker was as nonthreatening as they come. Nary a second glance was given to this grandmotherly figure by those who crossed her path, perhaps, at most a polite tip of the hat. Of course, as the age-old adage goes, appearances are often deceiving.

At the height of the Dust Bowl came a heat wave in 1936. Ironically, the weather early that year did not exactly suggest that heat would be a problem. In fact, February 1936 was the coldest month in the nation's history. As a result, when the weather began to warm up in March and April, people breathed a sigh of relief, but it kept getting warmer, and rain ceased to fall in some areas. In June, normally warm southern states grew unbearably hot, setting record high temperatures in excess of 110 degrees.

From the critically acclaimed author of Bloodroot, a gripping, wondrously evocative novel of a family in turmoil, set against the backdrop of real-life historical event—the story of three days in the summer of 1936, as a government-built dam is about to flood an Appalachian town, and a little girl goes missing.

Legendary writer Trevanian brings readers his most personal novel yet: a funny, deeply felt, often touching autobiographical novel destined to become a classic American coming-of-age story.

This true story took place at the emergency farm-labor camp immortalized in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Ostracized as "dumb Okies," the children of Dust Bowl migrant laborers went without school—until Superintendent Leo Hart and 50 Okie kids built their own school in a nearby field.