Central Kansas Library System

The Fourth of July delivers more than just the local display of fireworks for Samuel and Julia Wortham. They return from the festivities in Dearing, Illinois, to find Samuel's borther Edward, out of prison and on their doorstep. Surprise turns to shock and confusion as Edward introduces a young girl named Katie and declares that Samuel is her father. Samuel maintains his innocence and cannot understand why his brother would make up such a story, Julia...

In Leisha Kelly's well-received novel, Julia's Hope, Samuel and Julia Wortham and their two children charmed readers as they found shelter in the home-and heart-of a grandmotherly woman named Emma Graham. Now, in Emma's Gift, the Wortham family is struck down by the deaths of two close friends, including their neighbor Wilametta Hammond, just days before Christmas 1931. Wila is the mother of ten children and the glue that holds the family together....

Tillison County, Oklahoma, 1938. Kathleen Dolan has high hopes for her investment in the Rawlings, Oklahoma, Gazette. But the feisty newspaper woman hasn't even reached the city limits when trouble strikes: hijackers try to steal her old Nash. Although handsome rancher Johnny Henry comes to her rescue, the attack is only a taste of the perils to come. For Rawlings is a town steeped in dirty secrets, and soon Kathleen will find herself pitted against...

The Grapes of Wrath is a landmark of American literature. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man's fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman's stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. Although it follows the movement of thousands of men and women and the transformation of an entire nation, The Grapes of Wrath...

When Grace's family is evicted from their Washington, D.C., apartment just before Christmas 1932, and she and her younger brothers are sent to the Mission, Grace wonders what will become of her sick older brother, her pregnant mother, and her out-of-work father.

Discusses the disastrous drought in the United States during the 1930s which made a "dust bowl" out of part of the Great Plains, which caused great hardship for farmers, and the enactment of programs and reforms to help the people and land.