I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Oh, sure, we have another world war coming, and another great depression, but where are the leaders this time?

In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

This was life in the ’30s. This is the way it was with children in the South. I tried to make it general, the kind of things that might happen to any child.

I grew up in an era of pretty severe poverty. My parents weathered the Great Depression, and money was always a very big concern. I was weaned on a shortage mentality and placed in foster homes largely because there simply wasn’t enough money to take care of the most basic of needs.

I’ve read everything Thomas Wolfe ever wrote; my brother and I memorized whole chapters of ‚You Can’t Go Home Again‘ and ‚Look Homeward, Angel.‘

There are no second acts in American lives.

In the 1930s, unemployed working people could anticipate that their jobs would come back.

I think I belong to America’s last generation of novelists. Novelists will come one by one from now on, not in seeming families, and will perhaps write only one or two novels, and let it go at that.

Whatever the reasons may be, I was very much affected by events of the 1930s – the Spanish Civil War, for example, though I was barely literate.

For a person who grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, ‚Here I am, read me.‘ Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.