Years of Struggle: The Farm Diary of Elmer G. Powers, 1931-1936 - Hardcover

9780813806006: Years of Struggle: The Farm Diary of Elmer G. Powers, 1931-1936

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813806003 ISBN 13: 9780813806006

Publisher: Iowa State University Press, 1976

If it were not for his remarkable diary, Elmer G. Powers would have been long forgotten, save by the members of his family. Powers was an Iowa farmer eking out an existence during the depression and drought of the 1930s. The most important things in his life were the land, his family, and his church. Every day for eleven years he sat down to write about the crops, his livestock, the weather, his neighbors, the family's activities, and his views on political and social issues of the day (and they were often volatile issues) as well as his deep and abiding love for the good earth and country living. WHAT emerges of Elmer Powers, from reading his diary forty years later, is a portrait of an articulate and concerned farmer trapped between rock-bottom depression prices and the whims of nature. Elmer was by no means an intellectual, but he had an extraordinary grasp of the drama unfolding in 1936's snowdrifts, debts, and drought. He penned other passages that portray equally well the monotony of farm life-the never-ending cycle of farm chores and fieldwork.

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