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.

Inspired by a true strory. Norman Kamp dreams of riding a horse just like Hopalong Cassidy and won't let polio hold him back. America is in the midst of the Great Depression and the Kamp family is overwhelmed by the dismal economy. Everything begins to change when they scrape together a dollar in coins to use for a gift exchange.

In 1934, during the Depression, Kit's cantankerous uncle comes to live in the Cincinnati boardinghouse run by her parents, enlisting her aid in transcribing his complaining letters to the editor of the local newspaper and inspiring her to write a different kind of letter of her own.

The Depression hits home for nine year old Kit Kittredge when her dad loses his business and leaves to find work. To keep their home, Kit and her mother take in boarders. When a lockbox with all their money is stolen, Kit's new hobo friend Will is the prime suspect. Kit refuses to believe Will would steal, and her efforts to uncover the truth get her and her pals in trouble.

Narrator Gladys Cailiff is eleven years old in 1938 when a new schoolteacher turns Threestep, Georgia, upside down. Miss Grace Spivey is a well-traveled young woman who believes in field trips, Arabian costumes, and reading aloud from her ten-volume set of The Thousand Nights and a Night. The real trouble begins when she decides to revive the annual town festival as an exotic Baghdad bazaar. Miss Spivey and her project transform the lives of everyone

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In the aftermath of a devastating tornado that rips through the town of Tupelo, Mississippi, at the height of the Great Depression, two women worlds apart-one black, one white; one a great-grandmother, the other a teenager-fight for their families' survival in this lyrical and powerful novel "Gwin's gift shines in the complexity of her characters and their fraught relationships with each other, their capacity for courage and hope, coupled with their...

It is set in the 1933 Depression Era and told through the eyes of John Boy, the seventeen-year-old eldest child of John and Olivia Walton. His mother expects John-Boy to help her raise his sisters and brothers, and his father expects him to follow in his footsteps to help support the family, but secretly, John Boy wants to be a writer. Times are hard enough in 1933, but to make matters worse, it looked to be the Waltons' first Christmas without John...

Richard Thomas plays the key role of John-Boy Walton, a youth on the verge of manhood during the Great Depression and a fledgling writer whose observations are filled with the growing-up lessons and love he receives from his family.

"The story of the Holbrook family as they migrate from coal-mining town to farm to industrial city, struggling for a more tolerable existence. Their lives, made unforgettably real, reveal both the maiming power of circumstance and the sources of human endurance and hope ..."--P. [4] of cover.