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...

A chronicle based on four years of reporting follows five teenage girls as they come of age in one of the most challenging and geographically isolated regions on the Eastern seaboard--Washington County, Maine. Washington County, Maine. Willow, Vivian, Mckenna, Audrey, and Josie are teenage girls caught between tradition and transformation in this remote region. For four years Georges followed their journeys of heartbreak and hope in uncertain times:...

Gwyn Hillerman acts as a nurse at her father's medical practice in 1935 rural Alaska. Her mother, hating Alaska, had returned to Chicago with Gwyn's younger sister. There Sophia's engagement to Dr. Jeremiah Vaughan ends when he loses his medical license after the death of an affluent patient. Then the government decides to send a group of families to Alaska for a better life, and Dr. Hillerman urges Jeremiah to join his practice.

Television series about the Walton family living on Walton's Mountain in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. This season is a big year for welcomes-- welcome back to John-Boy, visiting from New York, and to Grandma, finally home from the hospital. And welcome to the family for Mary Ellen and Curt's baby boy, John Curtis. But all that joy is set against the tragedy of events in the outside world. As the fall of 1939 turns into the spring of 1940,...

"These eleven stories blend gravity and humor to depict late 20th century rural North Carolina life, including African American women protagonists who encounter love and relationships, mental illness, racism, and, especially among Jehovah's Witnesses' faith"--Provided by publisher.

"The star of The Incredible Dr. Pol shares his amusing, and often poignant, tales from his four decades as a vet in rural Michigan. Dr. Jan Pol is not your typical veterinarian. Born and raised the in Netherlands on a dairy farm, he is the star of Nat Geo Wild's hit show The Incredible Dr. Pol and has been treating animals in rural Michigan since the 1970s. Dr. Pol's more than 20,000 patients have ranged from white mice to 2600 pound horses and everything...

From a new literary star and acclaimed author of Pawpaw Patch, Necessary Lies and Dark of the Moon comes the haunting and poignant novel of a family in crisis, set in the backwoods of Georgia. Meet the Scurvy family, an impoverished clan who are the scourge of their small white-trash community. Mother has died in childbirth, leaving behind her newborn and four uneducated children. Father, a toothless and slothful man, cannot muster the money for...

Chosen from millions of children to serve in Mao's cultural revolution by studying at the Beijing Dance Academy, Li knew ballet would be his family's best opportunity to escape the bitter poverty in his rural China home. From one hardship to another, Li persevered, never forgetting the family he left behind.

A searing and profound Southern odyssey by National Book Award winner Jesmyn Ward. In Jesmyn Ward's first novel since her National Book Award-winning Salvage the Bones, this singular American writer brings the archetypal road novel into rural twenty-first-century America. Drawing on Morrison and Faulkner, The Odyssey and the Old Testament, Ward gives us an epochal story, a journey through Mississippi's past and present that is both an intimate portrait...

"An epic love story that explores the American Dream between the monolith of Jim Crow, the inflexible world of the original Black upper class, and the violence of 1920s Chicago"-- 1921, Chicago. Nelly Sawyer is the daughter of the "wealthiest Negro in America," whose affluence catapulted his family to the heights of Black society. After the unexpected death of her only brother, Nelly becomes the premier debutante overnight. But Nelly has aspirations...