Fleming Community Library

Thus begins the new novel from John Grisham, a story inspired by his own childhood in rural Arkansas. The narrator is a farm boy name Luke Chandler, age seven, who lives in the cotton fields with his parents and grandparents in a little house that's never been painted. The Chandlers farm eighty acres that they rent, not own, and when the cotton is ready they hire a truck-load of Mexicans and a family from the Ozarks to help harvest it. For six weeks...

For twelve-year-old Martha "Sonny" Creech, there is no place more beautiful than her family's cotton farm. She, her two brothers, and her parents work hard on their land, but only Sonny loves the rich, dark earth the way her father does. When a tragic accident claims his life, her stricken family struggles to fend off ruin until their rich, reclusive neighbor offers to help finance that year's cotton crop. Sonny is dismayed when her mama accepts Frank...

Based on reportage Agee did for Fortune magazine in 1936 covering three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, and Agee's subsequent piece entitled 'Let us now praise famous men,' this work is a rediscovered 30,000-word typescript, published for the first time and is one of the most relevant and honest depictions of poverty in America's South.