Up Before Daylight: Life Histories from the Alabama Writers’ Project, 1938-39

These compelling accounts of hard times and hard work reveal human courage, dignity, and resilience from a generation that endured the Great Depression.

One achievement of the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project was its ambitious collection of life histories based on interviews with southern workers and farmers. For Up before Daylight James Seay Brown chose 28 of the more than 100 accounts from throughout Alabama as a rich sampling–from the Tennessee Valley to the Gulf Coast and from cities as well as rural regions. First published in 1982, Up before Daylight is now available in a reprint edition containing a revised preface by the editor and a new foreword by Alabama historian Wayne Flynt.