Cranston Public Library

Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy's passionate tale of the beautiful, headstrong farmer Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, firmly established the thirty-four-year-old writer as a popular novelist. According to Virginia Woolf, "The subject was right; the method was right; the poet and the countryman, the sensual man, the sombre reflective man, the man of learning, all enlisted to produce a book which . . . must hold its place among the great...

A haunting tribute to the heroic pioneers who shaped the American Midwest This powerful novel by Willa Cather is considered to be one of her finest works and placed Cather in the forefront of women novelists. It tells the stories of several immigrant families who start new lives in America in rural Nebraska. This powerful tribute to the quiet heroism of those whose struggles and triumphs shaped the American Midwest highlights the role of women pioneers,...

The interwoven lives of a community in Colorado. The characters include two cattle farmers who take in a girl, thrown out of her house for becoming pregnant. The novel describes the girl's impact on their lives, both men being bachelors.

The classic novel of a Georgia family undone by the Great Depression: “[A] story of force and beauty” (New York Post). Even before the Great Depression struck, Jeeter Lester and his family were desperately poor sharecroppers. But when hard times begin to affect the families that once helped support them, the Lesters slip completely into the abyss. Rather than hold on to each other for support, Jeeter, his wife Ada, and...

Pearl S. Buck's epic Pulitzer prize-winning novel of a China that was now in a contemporary classics edition. Though more than sixty years have passed since this remarkable novel won the Pulitzer prize, it has retained its popularity and become one of the great modern classics. "I can only write what I know, and I know nothing but China, having always lived there," wrote Pearl Buck. In the Good Earth she presents a graphic view of a China when the...

An astronaut-in-training has to leave NASA (to save the family farm) but just can't give up on his dream of shooting into space, even if he has to do it all by himself. And that will of course get everyone up in arms, from his wife to his banker to the town gossips to the media and the Department of Homeland Security.

"Percy Schmeiser, a third-generation farmer, is sued by a corporate giant for allegedly using their patented seeds. With little resources to fight the giant legal battle, Percy joins forces with up-and-coming attorney Jackson Weaver and environmental activist Rebecca Salcau to fight one of the most monumental cases all the way up to the Supreme Court." --

"[Profiles] fifteen . . . women have made great strides in the field of food, whether it's coming up with meals for astronauts to eat in space, operating a 20-acre farm, hosting a food podcast, or fighting for food rights"--

Photographs capture the horrific conditions of this national disaster, the struggles of the people who stayed to save their land, and the sorrows of those who were forced to move as a result of this catastrophe.