The Path Was Steep : A Memoir of Appalachian Coal Camps During the Great Depression

Sue Pickett was a coal miner_s daughter who became a coal miner_s wife and witnessed and lived through the turbulent years of the Great Depression and the sometimes violent struggles between labor unions and coal mine bosses throughout the Appalachian South_especially her native Alabama. The dramatic central episode in her account is a March 1934 standoff between striking miners and the mine owners.Pickett_s story is peopled with memorable characters, including her irrepressible husband David and an almost Biblical cast of other family members; a roaring, fire-belching automobile nicknamed Thunderbolt; Irene, a fiercely proud ten-year-old mountain girl left homeless by the hard times; and many others. The memoir is a saga of determined working-class people making do and getting by, but equally of their love of family and land.