In late 1933 and early 1934, Harry Hopkins, director of the infant Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), dispatched an elite corps of journalists and authors, including Bruce McClure and Lorena Hickok, to obtain a grass-roots portrait of Depression-wracked America. His marching orders to Hickok were "to go out around the country and look this thing over.... Tell me what you see and hear.... All of it."
She and her compatriots...