In the 1920s Genevieve Sadler left her home in California for what she thought would be a short visit to the Arkansas farm where her husband grew up. The visit lasted seven years, and Sadler’s life was changed forever in the time she spent among the cotton farms near Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansas, on the eve of the Great Depression. Based on her long and detailed letters to her mother, she wrote this engaging memoir with its rich portrait of a small town and its inhabitants, many of whom were poor cotton farmers working on shares.

Genevieve Grant Sadler was born on February 1, 1893, in Armstrong, British Columbia, and grew up in Santa Cruz, California. She died in California in 1967.