I was borned in a ridgepocket. ... I never seed the sun-ball withouten heisting my chin. My eyes were sot upon the hills from the beginning. Till I come on the Word in this good Book, I used to think a mountain was the standingest object in the sight o’ God. Hit says here they go skipping and hopping like sheep, a-rising and a-falling. These hills are jist dirt waves, washing through eternity. My brethren, they hain’t a valley so low but what hit’ll rise again. They hain’t a hill standing so proud but hit’ll sink to the low ground o’ sorrow. Oh, my children, where air we going on this mighty river of earth, a-borning, begetting, and a-dying—the living and the dead riding the waters? Where air it sweeping us?

Published within a year of each other by the same publisher, River of Earth and The Grapes of Wrath are the only books chronicling the demoralizing Depression years that have continued to gain readers in more affluent ones. The major difference between them is that Steinbeck’s story deals with a calamity that has struck America only once in its lifetime, while Still is writing of the struggles that have plagued the mountain people since the country was settled.

Although the Joads travel halfway across the country and the Baldridge family moves only the few miles separating the coal camps from the farm, both books are equally an odyssey of a people in search of a promised land. With the coming of each spring and each fall Brack Baldridge announces that the mines are going to open soon—this time for good. And the mother’s continual refrain is: “Forever moving yon and back, setting down nowhere for good and all, searching for God knows what. . . . Where air we expecting to draw up to?”

And when the mines close and the crops fail there is little complaining. They simply pack up and move again, accepting, hoping, laughing to make their misfortune bearable.

More than twenty years before the region was labeled a “poverty pocket” and prior to the surprised reactions of experts and government officials to the problems of destitution, as though they had encountered some recent wonder, James Still had presented the heartbreaking account of what it means for a human being to live out his life hungry and cold. His is not a socioeconomist’s collection of figures, causes, and possible cures, but the dramatized plight of human beings accepting poverty without accusations or judgments or rantings against outside institutions.