Publisher's Synopsis
The Place Beyond the Dust BowlThe Place Beyond the Dust Bowl is a gripping account of life after the "Grapes of Wrath." It is the story of the plight of Hughart's migrant family from the Dust Bowl of America, who fled to California and the West to start life anew. The book comes alive in this story of a boy's struggle through life to manhood. Also available on Kindle is Hughart's Beyond the Dust Bowl With a Pocket Full of Peanuts.Review: The Dust Bowl epic didn't end when Henry Fonda said goodbye to Jane Darwell on a movie screen. It was, in fact, just beginning. Well into the 1940s, the midwestern-and-southwestern exodus intensified while within California, many migrant families like Ron Hughart's danced with poverty as they continued an internal migration that could last for years, searching for work, searching for security.Hughart's writing offers an inside glimpse at that life, yearning for the lost home while seeking a new one, children living in the midst of those yearnings. Sensing the tension felt by his parents as they sought to provide for their five youngsters, the child Ronnie is nevertheless captured by wonders of the road--the Big Orange that beckons alongside Highway 99, the airplane apparently captured mid-crash on the roof of a restaurant near Fowler, and the enduring magic of cool morning air during sizzling summers. Hughart's perspective, looking back on an Okie boyhood in California's agricultural cornucopia, the Great Central Valley, takes readers into the cultural ferment engendered by the great migration, a way of life that never quite abandoned Oklahoma, and enriched California in the process. A new California was being born as the experiences in these pages unfold.Gerald W. HaslamWriter
