A Year Down Yonder
by Richard Peck
During the recession of 1937, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice is sent to live with her feisty, larger-than-life grandmother in rural Illinois and comes to a better understanding of this fearsome woman. With the same combination of wit, gentleness, and outrageous farce as Peck's Newbery Honor book, Long Way from Chicago (1998), this sequel tells the story of Joey's younger sister, Mary Alice, 15, who spends the year of 1937 back with Grandma Dowdel in a small town in Illinois.

Bud, Not Buddy
by Christopher Paul Curtis
Ten-year-old Bud, a motherless boy living in Flint, Michigan, during the Great Depression, escapes a bad foster home and sets out in search of the man he believes to be his father--the renowned bandleader, H.E. Calloway of Grand Rapids.

Christmas After All : the Great Depression Diary of Minnie Swift
by Kathryn Lasky
In her fictionalized journal, eleven-year-old Minnie Swift recounts how her family dealt with the difficult times during the Depression and how the arrival of an orphan from Texas changed their lives in Indianapolis just before Christmas 1932.

The Truth About Sparrows
by Marian Hale
Twelve-year-old Sadie promises that she will always be Wilma's best friend when their families leaves drought-stricken Missouri in 1933, but once in Texas, Sadie learns that she must try to make a new home--and new friends, too.

Out of the Dust
by Karen Hesse
In a series of poems, fifteen-year-old Billie Jo relates the hardships of living on her family's wheat farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl years of the Depression.

Butterflies and Lizards, Beryl and Me
by Ruth Lercher Bornstein
In 1934, eleven-year-old Charlotte and her mother move to tiny Valley Junction, Missouri, where Charlotte befriends an eccentric old woman in spite of her mother's and others' warnings.

Dust for Dinner
by Ann Turner
Jake narrates the story of his family's life in the Oklahoma dust bowl and the journey from their ravaged farm to California during the Great Depression.

The Storm in the Barn
by Matt Phelan
In Kansas in the year 1937, eleven-year-old Jack Clark faces his share of ordinary challenges: local bullies, his father's failed expectations, a little sister with an eye for trouble. But he also has to deal with the effects of the Dust Bowl, including rising tensions in his small town and the spread of a shadowy illness.

The Miner's Daughter
by Gretchen Moran Laskas
Sixteen-year-old Willa, living in a Depression-era West Virginia mining town, works hard to help her family, experiences love and friendship, and finds an outlet for her writing when her family becomes part of the Arthurdale, West Virginia, community supported by Eleanor Roosevelt.

The Grapes of Wrath
by John Steinbeck
The story of the Joads, set during the Great Depression, as they struggle to make ends meet.

Poor is Just a Starting Place
by Leslie J. Wyatt
During the Great Depression, twelve-year-old Artie Wilson, determined to escape plowing and planting the fields and milking the cow on her family's farm, longs to leave Buck Creek, Kentucky, and her life of poverty.

It Had to be You: a Grace & Favor Mystery
by Jill Churchill
The plucky siblings Robert and Lily may live in Grace & Favor Cottage, on the Hudson, in 1933, but they must work to keep it. A local woman has turned her own home into a nursing home, and both Robert and Lily are hired to replace a sick nurse. When a difficult and crabby inmate is murdered only days from his expected natural death, the siblings join forces with the local police to try to solve the case. .

Fallen Angels
by Patricia Hickman
On the run from the law for reasons he keeps to himself, Jeb Nubey is talked into driving a trio of abandoned siblings to the small town of Nazareth, Arkansas during the Great Depression, where a comedy of errors causes the group to pretend they are a preaching family.

Leaving Home
by Garrison Keillor
This collection of stories set in Lake Wobegon is taken from monologues performed on A Prairie Home Companion, Keillor's radio show; each one chronicles some kind of leave-taking or homecoming: trips to Minneapolis, high school graduations, attending the Minnesota State Fair, a waitress quitting her job at the Chatterbox Cafe, a boy joining the army, Father Emil retiring from Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility, family members returning to Lake Wobegon for Christmas. In the last story, from Keillor's final show, the storyteller bids farewell to his beloved hometown. Keillor has a rare gift for celebrating and finding humor in commonplace events, and his affection for his characters and for small-town life shines through.

Charms for the Easy Life
by Kaye Gibbons
This novel depicts three generations of Southern women living together during World War II. Unworthy men marry into this formidable tribe, but they cannot break the women's circle of strength and grace. Margaret, the narrator, gently and humorously regales readers with the adventures of her grandmother, Charlie Kate, as a respectable yet unlicensed physician. Without losing her rural sensibility, Gibbons moves from her previous country settings to Raleigh, the capital of her native North Carolina. Her characters remain quirky without being quaint.

Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression
by Mildred Armstrong Kalish
Kalish's memoir of her Iowa childhood, set against the backdrop of the Depression, captures a vanished way of traditional living and a specific moment in American history in a story both illuminating and memorable.

Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories: and Other Disasters
by Jean Shepherd
For that small but populous slice of the world reachable by radio station WOR (New York City and environs), Jean Shepherd was once a nightly fixture, back in the days when radio talk didn't shock. On the air, he would tell tales of his Indiana boyhood, which he eventually refined enough to write down. Wanda Hickey's Night of Golden Memories collects the stories that first appeared in magazines in the 1960s and '70s.

Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
by Fannie Flagg
Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is the now-classic novel of two women in the 1980s; of gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women--of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth--who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present--for Evelyn and for us--will never be quite the same again...