1. The most compelling personal testimony to the dramatic impact of the Depression on individual lives is contained first in the oral history interviews collected by Studs Terkel in Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (Allan Lane: London, 1970), then in the life histories taken down in the 1930s by the Federal Writers’ Project. Selections of these have been edited by
2. Ann Banks, First-Person America (Knopf: New York, 1980), and by
3. Tom Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch, Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1978).
4. Over 15,000,000 letters from the public survive in the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library. Robert S. McElvaine studied a random sample of 15,000 of these and other letters to federal agencies for a study of working-class reactions to the Depression. His Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man (University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill, 1983) contains a selection of these, together with letters to Hoover’s relief coordinating committees and to Senator Robert F. Wagner.
5. Gilbert C. Fite, the doyen of American agricultural historians, provides the best analysis of the general problems confronting American farmers in American Farmers: The New Majority (Indiana University Press: Bloomington, 1981), ch. 2. See also