Yesterday Today: Life in the Ozarks [Paperback]

The emergence into pop culture of quaint and simple Ozarks Mountaineers—through the writings of Vance Randolph, Wayman Hogue, Charles Morrow Wilson, and others—was a comfort and fascination to many Americans in the early twentieth century. Disillusioned with the modernity they felt had contributed to the Great Depression, middle-class Americans admired the Ozarkers’ apparently simple way of life, which they saw as an alternative to an increasingly urban and industrial America.

Catherine S. Barker's 1941 bookYesterday Today: Life in the Ozarkssought to illuminate another side of these “remnants of eighteenth-century life and culture”: poverty and despair. Drawing on her encounters and experiences as a federal social worker in the backwoods of the Ozarks in the 1930s, Barker described the mountaineers as “lovable and pathetic and needy and self-satisfied and valiant,” declaring that the virtuous and independent people of the hills deserved a better way and a more abundant life. Barker was also convinced that there were just as many contemptible facets of life in the Ozarks that needed to be replaced as there were virtues that needed to be preserved.

This reprinting ofYesterday Today—edited and introduced by historian J. Blake Perkins—situates this account among the Great Depression-era chronicles of the Ozarks.“When Depression-era social worker Catherine S. Barker’sYesterday Todaywas first published in 1941,she described her federal relief clients in the rural Arkansas Ozarks as ‘people well worth knowing.’ In this new edition,editor J. Blake Perkins provides an explanation of the life and times of Barker, shedding light on her filtered perceptions of 1930s Ozarkers struggling to make ends meet. Perkins shows us that Barker, too, was a person ‘well worth knowing’ and thatYesterday Todayis a book well worth readinlC*