Set between 1950 and 1963, this coming-of-age memoir discusses one of America’s most taboo subjects: social class. Combining recollections, accounts, and analysis, this book leans on Maw, Pap, Ony Mae, and other members of this rambunctious Scots-Irish family to chronicle the often heartbreaking postwar journey of 22 million rural Americans into the cities, where they became the foundation of a permanent white underclass. Telling the stories of the gun-owning, uninsured, underemployed white tribes inhabiting America’s heartlands, this record offers an intimate look at what was lost in the orchestrated postwar shift from an agricultural to an urban consumer society.
