When her father's business closes because of the Great Depression forcing Kit to make changes in her life, the nine-year-old responds with resourcefulness.

While on assignment to create a mural for the Dawes, Wyoming Post Office, painter Val Welch finds himself entranced by his hosts, John and Eve Long, but when Eve flees with a valuable painting, John recruits Val to track her down.

In 1934 Kit finds that she has hard lessons to learn about the Depression both at home, where she is helping her mother run a boarding house while her father looks for a new job, and at school, where a fight spoils the preparations for the Thanksgiving pageant.

A boy recounts his annual summer trips to rural Illinois with his sister during the Great Depression to visit their larger-than-life grandmother.

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.

First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human...

"2 Children for sale." The sign is a last resort. It sits on a farmhouse porch in 1931, but could be found anywhere in an era of breadlines, bank runs and broken dreams. It could have been written by any mother facing impossible choices. For struggling reporter Ellis Reed, the gut-wrenching scene evokes memories of his family's dark past. He snaps a photograph of the children, not meant for publication. But when it leads to his big break, the consequences...

"Miss Layla Beck, the daughter of a powerful Senator from Delaware refuses to marry the gentleman her father has chosen for her and is forced to get a job working for the FWP to write the first official account of Maecdonian History. Her notions of real life--the social whirl of Newport and New York--are totally upended and she despairs in rooming with the overly eccentric Romeyn family in such a small backwater town. The Romeyn family is a fixture...

The magic tree house carries Jack and Annie to New York City in 1938 on a mission to rescue a magical unicorn from New York City. They arrive during one of the darkest periods in the city's history--the Great Depression. Even worse, the city is in the grip of a terrible snowstorm. Where will Jack and Annie ever find a unicorn in the city? And who are the mysterious people following them? Includes instructions to make a snow globe.

Discusses difficult times in the Great Plains because of the economy and very dry conditions.