Growing Up In The Great Depression: Growing Up By Russell Baker

Jack Hettinger Mrs. Day 9th Honors Literature and Composition 21 August 2014 Hobos, Riding the Rails, and the Scottsboro Boys In 1929 the Stock Market crashed and caused many people to lose their jobs and become homeless. The people that lost their jobs due to the stock market crash were called hobos. This era in American history was called the Great Depression. Life was very difficult during the Great Depression and it was a struggle to make money for food and shelter. Obtaining a job was very difficult too.

Over 15 million Americans became jobless during the great depression and many were left homeless because they could not afford to keep the payments of the houses they had rented out. Some people were left with almost nothing and committed suicide because of this. The great depression really was a depressing time for most Americans. The depression caused people to become migrant workers, they had to leave home to find work. Families were split up and many men and women became very lonely.

Bruce Springsteins I Aint Got No Home (In This World Anymore) and the Great Depression The 1930s was the time of The Great Depression, which resulted in drastic changes. There were many people who starved trying to find employment, while many others did what was possible to survive a little longer. Everyone across the United Stated had tough times; especially families who tried to stick together to survive. American families were left out on the streets because they couldn’t pay their debts. Most had no other choice than to split up to find their own ways of surviving.

However there is much to learn about the United States in its economic turmoil. During the depression, thousands of people looked for work, and were cheated every step of the way. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, is the story about a family living during the days of the depression and what they did to survive. Many families were hurt by the depression, so Steinbeck wrote of a typical family with detail that makes you understand the pain and suffering people went through in the country’s darkest of times. Tom Joad, recently released from prison for a homicide, hitchhikes back home to his fathers farm which he hasn’t been to in 4 years.

During the early 1920s the Great Depression took place. The Great Depression affected many people's lives. The immigrants caught the worst of it. They had just come from another country and were trying to start their new lives when the depression hit. They had to struggle once more with poverty and desperation in taking care of their families, the main reason they had left their old countries was to escape the same epidemic that was now overtaking ?the land of the free?.

Charles Dickens had first hand experience of poverty; his parents were imprisoned for a year for being offenders of the poor laws- they hadn't enough money to support their family and got into debt, which they couldn't pay. So Charles spent most of his time walking around the dirty back streets of London, where he witnessed a great deal of poor people who had been reduced to criminals, prostitutes and beggars who lived surrounded by poverty, disease and abandoned children whose parents were either dead or not able to look after their offspring financially. The vast division in society of lower and upper classes influenced Dickens to write to tell other people what the conditions for the poor were really like. He had to be subtle; he didn't want to alienate his upper class audience. So he wrote a novel, revolving around memorable characters and places to entertain his audience.

The deaths of his sisters heavily affected his life as a child and an adult. Fitzgera... ... middle of paper ... ...reflects a lot on recollections of his childhood and a young child's longing for the material things in life, until he realizes over the years when he has became a successful and wealthy adult that the greatest value of dreams resides in hard work and striving, not in fulfillment. A majority of Fitzgerald's writings mirror his relationship with Zelda Sayre. Zelda suffered several breakdowns in both her physical and mental health, and sought treatment in and out of clinics from 1930 until her death. “Zelda's mental illness, the subject of Fitzgerald's fourth novel, Tender is the Night, had a debilitating effect on Scott's writing” (Palmisano).

Unbeknown... ... middle of paper ... ...igh the unemployment percentages rose after the 1929 crash. Among those who were unemployed, more often than not there were multiple families needing to be supported from that money being made from the employed mother or father. The living conditions of those living during this decade also fell to an all time low. Homeless families were forced to live in their cars, or create makeshift homes out of scraps. These became the infamous ‘Hoovervilles’ named after President Hoover were the huge communities in which displaced and homeless families lived.

Poe's life started tragically, when his father deserted his family and his mother died of tuberculosis (Bloom 1999). The death of his mother could have influenced some of his darker themes in his poems about death .He lived his childhood with a foster family who paid for his education (Bloom 1999). He went to a University for a while until he got into trouble. He had a gambling issue that latter put him into great debt; his foster father refused to pay for (Bloom 1999). Poe put his soul into writing and he used his personal experiences through out life.

The stock market was the main cause that forced American into the Great Depression. The stocks were a towering success until the collapse; the crash forced many Americans into poverty because they had to sell almost everything they had to repa... ... middle of paper ... ...tter poverty. The depression affected millions of Americans and I got to really feel what they went through when I watched the movie Cinderella Man. Jim Braddock the main character of the movie went thorough tough times; he lost his job, couldn’t support his family and witnessed loved ones being lost to the Great Depression. Going through all this just made him a stronger man.