Frank Carlson Library

A novel of star-crossed lovers, set in the circus world circa 1932. When Jacob Jankowski, recently orphaned and suddenly adrift, jumps onto a passing train, he enters a world of freaks, grifters, and misfits, a second-rate circus struggling to survive during the Great Depression, making one-night stands in town after endless town. A veterinary student who almost earned his degree, Jacob is put in charge of caring for the circus menagerie. It is there...

A fifteen-year-old boy struggles to find a life for himself in the turbulent depression of the 1930s.

No one writes about the South like Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg (All Over But the Shoutin). Once again, he lends his voice to the working people of the deep South, and tells the story of a memorable figure in a singular time-a man on a lost stretch of dirt road along the Alabama-Georgia border. The Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and author of All Over But the Shoutin' continues his personal history of the Deep South with an evocation of his...

The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath...

With all the narrative power and emotional immediacy that have made her novels acclaimed international bestsellers, Anita Shreve unfolds a richly engaging tale of marriage, money, and troubled times-the story of a pair of young newlyweds who, setting out to build a life together in a derelict beach house on the Atlantic coast, soon discover how threatening the world outside their front door can be.

Young widow Eliza, left alone to run Wyatt Orchards and raise three children, does not know how she is going to manage, when a stranger, Gabe, appears at her doorstep and turns out to be the answer to her prayers.

When resentment surges during the Great Depression in a Texas border town, Estrella, fifteen, organizes a protest against the treatment of tejanos and soon finds herself witih her mother and baby brother in Mexico. 1931. In the heart of the Great Depression, Rancho Las Moras, like everywhere else in Texas, is gripped by the drought of the Dust Bowl. Resentment is building among white farmers against Mexican Americans. When Estrella organizes a protest...