"A Marian Wood book."

Includes bibliographical references (p. [523]-555) and index.

It was the worst of times and the best of times. It was an era of unprecedented crisis and a time of unprecedented courage. Now, in a single, comprehensive volume, The Hungry Years tells the story of the Great Depression through the eyes of the people who lived through it. Less concerned with the power brokers in Washington than with the daily struggles of ordinary people at the grassroots level across America, it draws on little-known oral histories, memoirs, local press, and scholarly monographs to capture the voices of men and women in a time of extreme crisis. The result is a richly detailed narrative that traces the stages of the disaster chronologically without losing touch with the personal wounds it inflicted or the ways in which people responded. Book jacket. Also includes information on bank failures, blacks, California, Civil Works Administration (CWA), Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), relief measures, drought, Dust Bowl, dust storms, farm foreclosures, farmers, Great Plains, the land, lynching, Mexican Americans (Chicanos), migrant life in California, migrations, National Industrial Recovery Act, National Recovery Administration, New Deal, plantation system, poverty, relief, Resettlement Administration, sharecroppers, the South, strikes, tenant farmers, unemployment, unionism, violence, wages, women, Works Progress Administration (WPA), etc.