I wanted to write the Paint trilogy in part because I had heard so much of it directly from my parents and my aunts and uncles on both sides of the family. My portrait of farm life in the 1930s is taken more from life than from books: when I was born, my parents (the models for Jake and Emaline) were still living a life much like the life they endured during the Great Depression. I grew up milking the cows by hand and running the milk through a hand separator, bringing sick calves into the kitchen on cold winter nights and watching my parents battle through the early part of the 1950s to hang on to their farm, just as they had done in the 1930s. The tractors and trucks were a different model, but that was about the only difference; I was fourteen years old before we could afford a television set.

In addition to my own memories and the oral history I was told growing up, I relied to some extent on family memoirs and I read widely other memoirs and novels of farm life in the 1930s. The Grapes of Wrath was useful for general background, but I relied more on the excellent work of Lois Hudson, especially The Bones of Plenty, a neglected American classic. The farming scenes depicted in Come Again No More, however, are based more on personal experience and the yarns my parents told around the kitchen table.

Do you think that the 1930s, with the Great Depression and Prohibition, was a dark time in American history or one filled with hope? Do you think the literature of that age agrees with you?