The Library of Alabama classics

coming of age novel

At the Moon's Inn, first published in 1941, provides a fictional account of De Soto's famous Spanish expedition to La Florida and through the southeastern United States between 1539 and 1543.

The Least One portrays a white sharecropping family during the Great Depression and is based on Borden Deal’s experiences growing up on a small farm in northeastern Mississippi. Deal portrays the realities of cotton-field work: planting, chopping, the laying-by time, and harvesting. He succeeds in evoking not only the crushing economic circumstances of poor Southern whites in that period but also their fierce sense of independence and self-sufficiency.

The Third Door: The Autobiography of an American Negro Woman (1955) tells of Ellen Tarry's life in the South, her migration to New York City, her friendship with Claude McKay, and her deep commitment to Catholicism.