Description

This collection of four, heart-rending stories encapsulates Martha Gellhorn's experience of observing the Great Depression at first hand. It is fiction crafted with documentary accuracy, a vivid rendering of the effect of grinding poverty on body and soul, and of the slow collapse of the simple, homely sufficiency of American life leading to a deepening spiral of hopelessness and need. Martha was the youngest of sixteen, handpicked reporters who filed accurate, confidential reports on the human stories behind the statistics of the Depression directly to Roosevelt's White House. From these pages, we understand the real cost of sudden destitution on a vast scale. We taste the dust in the mouth, smell the disease and feel the despair. And here, too, we can hear the earliest cadences of a writer who went on to become one of the greatest female war reporters of the 20th century.

Introduced by Caroline Moorehead