Home Front Girl: A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America

This diary of a smart, astute, and funny teenager provides a fascinating record of what an everyday American girl felt and thought during the Depression and the lead-up to World War II. Young Chicagoan Joan Wehlen describes her daily life growing up in the city and ruminates about the impending war, daily headlines, and major touchstones of the era—FDR’s radio addresses, the Lindbergh kidnapping, Goodbye Mr. Chips and Citizen Kane, Churchill and Hitler, war work and Red Cross meetings. Joan’s original handrawn doodles of her latest dress or haircut infuse the pages with whimsy and period flavor. Home Front Girl is not only an entertaining and delightful read but an important primary source on the late 1930s and early 1940s—a vivid account of a real American girl’s lived experiences.