Looking for the New Deal

"In Looking for the New Deal, Elna Green has unearthed a treasure trove of letters helping us better understand Florida and the tumultuous decade of the 1930s. In shades of pathos and comedy, hope and desperation, the letters document a state and society almost unrecognizable today. Readers learn about the lives and loves of mothers with blind and crippled children, daughters of destitute Confederate veterans, and wives and widowers of bootleggers and unemployed cigar makers."—Gary R. Mormino, Frank E. Duckwall Professor of Florida Studies, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

"Elna Green's fine collection of Florida women's depression-era letters makes for poignant reading. These letters reveal the great trust that the state's citizens placed in their elected officials, the unique hardships that Floridians faced, and especially the ways that women's experience of the Great Depression differed from that of men. Green's book is an important contribution to our efforts to understand how ordinary Americans understood both the economic crisis and the New Deal programs that sought to address it."—Melissa Walker, Converse College, author of All We Knew Was to Farm: Rural Women in the Upcountry South, 1919–1941 and editor of Country Women Cope With Hard Times: A Collection of Oral Histories

Bronze Medal, 2008 Florida Book Awards