Pretty Boy: The Life and Times Of Charles Arthur Floyd

In this outstanding work, Michael Wallis magnificently recreates the vanished, impoverished world of Dustbowl America that has not been as poignantly rendered in prose since John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath . Wallis evokes the hard times of the era of Steinbeck as he follows the life of Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd from his coming of age at a time when there were no jobs and no food, to his decent into petty crime, bootlegging, his murders, jail terms, and his own brutal slaying by the FBI in an Ohio field in 1934 at the age of thirty. Pretty Boy is a social history at its best, portraying, with a sweepings style, the larger story of the hardscrabble farmers whose lives were so intolerably shattered by Depression.