Hungry Years: A Narrative History of the Great Depression in America

"A big-hearted, abundant narrative . . . Watkins draws compelling portraits of people oscillating between despair and hope and a political culture in the midst of historic transformation."
--The Washington Post Book World

It was the worst of times and the best of times. It was an era of unprecedented crisis and a time of unprecedented courage. In a single, comprehensive volume, The Hungry Years tells the story of the Great Depression through the eyes of the people who lived it. Less concerned with the power brokers in Washington than with the daily struggles of ordinary people at the grassroots 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.

Humane and compassionate, brilliantly researched, full of story and anecdote, The Hungry Years puts the reader at the very heart of the maelstrom that was the American depression.