"A sweeping, vibrant first novel following a family of Indian sharecroppers at the onset of World War I, revealing an unknown part of California history"-- 1914. Ram Singh arrives in the Imperial Valley on the Mexican border, reluctantly accepting his friend Karak's offer of work and partnership in a small cantaloupe farm. Fleeing violence in Oregon, Ram desperately longs to return to his wife and newborn son in Punjab, but is duty bound to make...

John McMillan was only eight years old when his mother died and he was ripped, without warning, from his sheltered world of books and gentility. Now on his aunt's run-down tenant farm in southern Alabama, abused by his alcoholic uncle, and completely bereft, John longs for escape—his only hope for survival.
He's about to get his wish in a way no one could ever predict....A twist of fate will bring John to the Bend, a black settlement that has...

Progressive degeneration of a poor-white Georgia family living in a tumble-down shack on worn-out land that had once been a prosperous tobacco plantation. A tale of violence and sex among rural poor in the American South, the novel was highly controversial in its time. It is the story of Georgia sharecropper Jeeter Lester and his family, who are trapped by the bleak economic conditions of the Depression as well as by their own limited intelligence...

Beth Macy, master chronicler of life in the South, combines exhaustive research, exclusive interviews and sources, and attention to detail in this riveting American story about race, greed, and a mother's love. George and Willie Muse from Truevine, Virginia were two little boys born in a brutal time, sharecropping a field in the segregated South, stolen away by a white man offering candy, and set on a path of events that would forever change their...

August Wilson has already given the American theater such spell-binding plays about the black experience in 20th-century America as Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, Joe Turner's Come and Gone, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning, Fences. In his second Pulitzer Prize-winner, The Piano Lesson, Wilson has fashioned his most haunting and dramatic work yet. At the heart of the play stands the ornately carved upright piano which, as the Charles family's prized, hard-won...

Bankers plot to take over the farm of shiftless Jeeter Lester and his family. Old Jeeter hopes, through fate or larceny, to raise the annual rent of the old farm. A bowdlerized version of the once-notorious book.

Tobacco Road: The Great Depression compromises the morals of a poor farming family in Georgia. This classic, a Modern Library 100 Best Novels selection, was adapted for the stage in 1933 and made into a 1941 film directed by John Ford. God’s Little Acre: Desperation takes its toll on a deluded Southern farmer obsessed with sex, violence, and the promise of gold. Banned in Boston, censored in Georgia, and prosecuted by the New York Society for...

An Atlantic Monthly Press book.