Such As Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties

When These Are Our Lives was first published by The University of North Carolina Press in 1939, the late Charles A. Beard hailed it as “literature more powerful than anything I have read in fiction, not excluding Zola’s most vehement passages.” A very early experiment in the publication of oral history, it consisted of thirty–five life histories of sharecroppers, farmers, mill workers, townspeople, and the unemployed of the Southeast, selected from over a thousand such histories collected b...