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Hold Autumn in Your Hand
"The Texas January day was all blue and gold and barely crisp. Only the absence of leaves and sap, the presence of straggling bands of awkward crows, the gray-yellow flutter of field larks, and the broad, matter-of-fact hibernation of the earth said it was winter as Sam Tucker walked along the road, his long legs functioning automatically, farmerly. His body had about it the look of country dogs at the end of winter, when they are all ribs and leg muscles and jaw muscles and teeth. . . ." Hold Autumn in Your Hand, is the memorable story of Sam Tucker and the year that he contracts to farm sixty-eight acres of San Pedro bottomland. He is eager to work the rich soil despite the fact that he will earn only six bits a day. Sam, his wife Nona, their two children, and one of the most irrepressible grandmothers in modern fiction absorb the reader in their joys and disappointments. The story is built around Sam Tucker's determination to use his knowledge of the land and hard work to provide food for his family and hope for the future.
260 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1941
5 people are currently reading
226 people want to read
About the author
George Sessions Perry
32 books2 followersVirtually unknown today, Perry was one of Texas’ most celebrated authors in the 1940s and 50s.
Born in Rockdale in 1910, Perry attended several colleges, but never graduated. Instead, he moved back to his hometown and pushed through the Great Depression with a small inheritance and a determination to write about the rural and small-town life around him. He married the love of his life, Claire Hodges, on the 20th of February 1933 in her hometown of Beaumont, Texas. They would remain devoted to each other until his death, and had no children.
Publication in the Saturday Evening Post came in 1937, then a book deal. In 1941 came his masterwork, “Hold Autumn in Your Hand” — one of America’s most celebrated agrarian novels oft compared to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It won the Texas Institute of Letters award that year, became the first Texas book to win the National Book Award the next, and was made into a movie called The Southerner by famed French director Jean Renoir. It was to be his only novel.
Perry served as a war correspondent during World War II and so traumatized by the horrors he witnessed that he said it “defictionized” him for life. His subsequent work, no longer light-hearted, concentrated on nonfiction, including “My Granny Van” — about the maternal grandmother who raised him when he was orphaned at the age of 12 — and a history of Texas A&M University. Perry became a celebrated and well-paid magazine writer by the late 1940s.
Wracked by depression, hallucinations, acute arthritis and a drinking problem, in winter 1956 he walked out of his Connecticut home and into a nearby river; his body was found months later.
Born in Rockdale in 1910, Perry attended several colleges, but never graduated. Instead, he moved back to his hometown and pushed through the Great Depression with a small inheritance and a determination to write about the rural and small-town life around him. He married the love of his life, Claire Hodges, on the 20th of February 1933 in her hometown of Beaumont, Texas. They would remain devoted to each other until his death, and had no children.
Publication in the Saturday Evening Post came in 1937, then a book deal. In 1941 came his masterwork, “Hold Autumn in Your Hand” — one of America’s most celebrated agrarian novels oft compared to Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. It won the Texas Institute of Letters award that year, became the first Texas book to win the National Book Award the next, and was made into a movie called The Southerner by famed French director Jean Renoir. It was to be his only novel.
Perry served as a war correspondent during World War II and so traumatized by the horrors he witnessed that he said it “defictionized” him for life. His subsequent work, no longer light-hearted, concentrated on nonfiction, including “My Granny Van” — about the maternal grandmother who raised him when he was orphaned at the age of 12 — and a history of Texas A&M University. Perry became a celebrated and well-paid magazine writer by the late 1940s.
Wracked by depression, hallucinations, acute arthritis and a drinking problem, in winter 1956 he walked out of his Connecticut home and into a nearby river; his body was found months later.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
October 9, 2022
THE BOOK
Hold the Autumn in Your Hand opens in east Texas during the Great Depression with sharecropper Sam Tucker walking to the commissary of a large-scale farmer named Ruston. Sam talks Ruston into allowing him to farm a sixty-eight acre plot that is located some distance from Ruston’s large farm.
Sam doesn’t want to sharecrop, because he wants to make the decisions about when to plow, plant, cultivate, chop, and pick the cotton that will be the main crop on the farm. Instead of a share, he wants Ruston to pay him the same that he pays his laborers: six bits a day. In addition, when his wife worked in the field she would receive four bits. Therefore, on those days that both worked the family would bring in $1.25 a day.
That income would have to support five people: Sam, his wife Nona, their two children, and Sam’s grandmother. That’s low pay, but Sam estimates that he only averaged forty-six cents a day during his last three years of sharecropping in a region of infertile and worn-out sand hills soil. This new farm, while infested with Johnson grass, is nevertheless an area of rich black soil. Besides, the pay would be set and not dependent on crop yield, and that would add a degree of certainty in their lives that was absent during their sharecropping years.
(Oh, and by the way, Granny is a memorable character and one that will be hard to forget, and a heavy load for Sam, but even more so for his wife, Nona.)
The crop would belong to the landlord, but Sam would have something just as important, perhaps even more important, and that would be the satisfaction of knowing that he had made the crop. Sam loves farming and wants for the first time to “hold autumn in his hand,” because that is when all the planning and hard work will pay off, the time that the cotton is picked and taken to the gin.
It wouldn’t be easy, it never is, for there would be forces working against Sam – or any farmer: blight, insects (especially the boll weevil), rain (too much or not enough), hail, and invasive Johnson grass.
Even though Perry was a town boy, he had always sympathized with the poverty-stricken, but hard-working rural poor who made their living toiling in the cotton fields. He didn’t grow up on a farm but he nevertheless knew what it was like for those folks who did. He knew they were victims, but that they also could be dignified, courageous, and compassionate. His creation, Sam Tucker, was such a person.
I will give Maxine C. Hurston the last word on the book. She wrote in the afterword to my copy, that the book is “a moving statement of a timeless theme, man’s struggle to tame the land, and it is a powerful statement of one of the ways in which the American dream has failed.”
THE AUTHOR
George Sessions Perry was born in Rockdale in east Texas in 1910. When he was twelve-years old, his father died, and a year later his mother committed suicide. He then lived with his tyrannical, short-tempered maternal grandmother.
Beginning in 1931, he wrote six novels, which were never published, and about fifty short stories, which were never published, that is, not until 1937 when the Saturday Evening Post published one of them. That had the effect of breaking the dam leading to the publication of his first novel, Walls Rise Up (1939).
Hold Autumn in Your Hand was published two years later, and was a critical success and the recipient of the first ever National Book Award to be presented.
After the entrance of the U.S. into WWII, Perry attempted to enlist in the army, but failed the physical. However, out of an admitted sense of guilt, he became a war correspondent.
Participating in the invasion of Sicily, he became so traumatized by the unbearable nightmare of death and destruction that he witnessed, that he, as he put it, had become “defictionalized” and would never again want to write made-up stories – and he didn’t. Thereafter, he wrote only nonfiction.
He went on to become a well-known, highly-paid magazine contributor in the late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s. His writing was published in several magazines, but primarily in the hugely popular Saturday Evening Post.
His personal life, however, was out of control. He suffered from both mental and physical illnesses. His ailments included extremely painful arthritis of the spine, severe depression, hallucinations, and alcoholism. On a cold day in December 1956, he walked out of his Connecticut home and disappeared. His body was found two months later in a nearby river.
Since there were no marks on the body that would have indicated foul play, the police said it was an apparent suicide, but a coroner ruled that the cause of death was accidental drowning. Nobody who knew Perry in those later years was ever convinced that it was an accident. He was forty-six years old.
Today, George Sessions Perry is a mostly forgotten writer, but he is one who deserves to be remembered, especially for his agrarian Texas novel, Hold Autumn in Your Hand.
Hold the Autumn in Your Hand opens in east Texas during the Great Depression with sharecropper Sam Tucker walking to the commissary of a large-scale farmer named Ruston. Sam talks Ruston into allowing him to farm a sixty-eight acre plot that is located some distance from Ruston’s large farm.
Sam doesn’t want to sharecrop, because he wants to make the decisions about when to plow, plant, cultivate, chop, and pick the cotton that will be the main crop on the farm. Instead of a share, he wants Ruston to pay him the same that he pays his laborers: six bits a day. In addition, when his wife worked in the field she would receive four bits. Therefore, on those days that both worked the family would bring in $1.25 a day.
That income would have to support five people: Sam, his wife Nona, their two children, and Sam’s grandmother. That’s low pay, but Sam estimates that he only averaged forty-six cents a day during his last three years of sharecropping in a region of infertile and worn-out sand hills soil. This new farm, while infested with Johnson grass, is nevertheless an area of rich black soil. Besides, the pay would be set and not dependent on crop yield, and that would add a degree of certainty in their lives that was absent during their sharecropping years.
(Oh, and by the way, Granny is a memorable character and one that will be hard to forget, and a heavy load for Sam, but even more so for his wife, Nona.)
The crop would belong to the landlord, but Sam would have something just as important, perhaps even more important, and that would be the satisfaction of knowing that he had made the crop. Sam loves farming and wants for the first time to “hold autumn in his hand,” because that is when all the planning and hard work will pay off, the time that the cotton is picked and taken to the gin.
It wouldn’t be easy, it never is, for there would be forces working against Sam – or any farmer: blight, insects (especially the boll weevil), rain (too much or not enough), hail, and invasive Johnson grass.
Even though Perry was a town boy, he had always sympathized with the poverty-stricken, but hard-working rural poor who made their living toiling in the cotton fields. He didn’t grow up on a farm but he nevertheless knew what it was like for those folks who did. He knew they were victims, but that they also could be dignified, courageous, and compassionate. His creation, Sam Tucker, was such a person.
I will give Maxine C. Hurston the last word on the book. She wrote in the afterword to my copy, that the book is “a moving statement of a timeless theme, man’s struggle to tame the land, and it is a powerful statement of one of the ways in which the American dream has failed.”
THE AUTHOR
George Sessions Perry was born in Rockdale in east Texas in 1910. When he was twelve-years old, his father died, and a year later his mother committed suicide. He then lived with his tyrannical, short-tempered maternal grandmother.
Beginning in 1931, he wrote six novels, which were never published, and about fifty short stories, which were never published, that is, not until 1937 when the Saturday Evening Post published one of them. That had the effect of breaking the dam leading to the publication of his first novel, Walls Rise Up (1939).
Hold Autumn in Your Hand was published two years later, and was a critical success and the recipient of the first ever National Book Award to be presented.
After the entrance of the U.S. into WWII, Perry attempted to enlist in the army, but failed the physical. However, out of an admitted sense of guilt, he became a war correspondent.
Participating in the invasion of Sicily, he became so traumatized by the unbearable nightmare of death and destruction that he witnessed, that he, as he put it, had become “defictionalized” and would never again want to write made-up stories – and he didn’t. Thereafter, he wrote only nonfiction.
He went on to become a well-known, highly-paid magazine contributor in the late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s. His writing was published in several magazines, but primarily in the hugely popular Saturday Evening Post.
His personal life, however, was out of control. He suffered from both mental and physical illnesses. His ailments included extremely painful arthritis of the spine, severe depression, hallucinations, and alcoholism. On a cold day in December 1956, he walked out of his Connecticut home and disappeared. His body was found two months later in a nearby river.
Since there were no marks on the body that would have indicated foul play, the police said it was an apparent suicide, but a coroner ruled that the cause of death was accidental drowning. Nobody who knew Perry in those later years was ever convinced that it was an accident. He was forty-six years old.
Today, George Sessions Perry is a mostly forgotten writer, but he is one who deserves to be remembered, especially for his agrarian Texas novel, Hold Autumn in Your Hand.
May 28, 2023
Though I doubt he knew the word, Sam Tucker was an environmentalist of the first order. Find a good piece of land near a river, take care of it, farm it so as to get a good crop, do the right thing by your neighbors, family and land. Sam found the land all right, but it wasn't his. He didn't want to sharecrop, so made a deal with the owner to work it for wages, owner gets the right to sell the crop, but supplies the tools and seed and the falling down house on the property for Sam's use. Both he and Mr. Russell, the owner, thought they got the best of the deal. Sam didn't have to worry about weather or crop failure, but got paid wages to feed his family, and could take pride in what he produced. Mr. Russell got his land plowed and worked by one man instead of the crew he used to work his other 3000 acres. Sam called this "his play-pretty year."
Cotton and corn were the money crops, his wife got a vegetable garden for the family's use, and Sam set to work. This is the story of that year. It wasn't easy, and there were setbacks, but Sam got to fish and hunt and make trades with his neighbors and in town to feed and clothe his family, but just barely. This was subsistence farming, enough to get by, but never enough to get ahead. Sam was smart and could figure out innovative solutions to most problems, his wife Nona was just as hard working and supportive, his young daughter was smart as a whip in school, and there was a toddler son coming along. Sam's grandmother was the fly in the ointment. Mean and selfish and whiny, always feeling sorry for herself when she could get anyone to listen, she was tolerated.
This book won the very first National Book Award in 1942, and richly deserved it. Thanks again to Howard for finding this forgotten author and bringing him to our attention. I've lost count of how many times I've thanked him, and when you factor in other GR readers who have done the same, I'm sure he deserves some kind of medal.
Cotton and corn were the money crops, his wife got a vegetable garden for the family's use, and Sam set to work. This is the story of that year. It wasn't easy, and there were setbacks, but Sam got to fish and hunt and make trades with his neighbors and in town to feed and clothe his family, but just barely. This was subsistence farming, enough to get by, but never enough to get ahead. Sam was smart and could figure out innovative solutions to most problems, his wife Nona was just as hard working and supportive, his young daughter was smart as a whip in school, and there was a toddler son coming along. Sam's grandmother was the fly in the ointment. Mean and selfish and whiny, always feeling sorry for herself when she could get anyone to listen, she was tolerated.
This book won the very first National Book Award in 1942, and richly deserved it. Thanks again to Howard for finding this forgotten author and bringing him to our attention. I've lost count of how many times I've thanked him, and when you factor in other GR readers who have done the same, I'm sure he deserves some kind of medal.
March 18, 2021
Hold Autumn in Your Hand
This short novel is about Texas tenant farming during the Great Depression and it won the National Book Award in 1942.
The main character is Sam Tucker, a young patriarch of a poor family when they get a chance to move a few miles away to farm an area of bottoms near the San Pedro River. The dilapidated house they move into is without plumbing or electricity and it is so drafty because it is even missing one wall. So we follow Sam as he meets the neighbors and towns people while he tries to provide for his family without getting swindled. It is certainly a folksy read and while I don’t normally enjoy such books, there is an honesty and authenticity to Perry’s writing that I appreciated.
While the early chapters move slowly, it is in the latter chapters where the story progresses and also when we witness Sam finally confronting his nemesis.
Okay the writing is not at the level Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath but the author was quite popular in Texas. So I’m glad that I read it and you are comfortable reading books about some very impoverished characters you will probably enjoy this one too.
3.5 stars
This short novel is about Texas tenant farming during the Great Depression and it won the National Book Award in 1942.
The main character is Sam Tucker, a young patriarch of a poor family when they get a chance to move a few miles away to farm an area of bottoms near the San Pedro River. The dilapidated house they move into is without plumbing or electricity and it is so drafty because it is even missing one wall. So we follow Sam as he meets the neighbors and towns people while he tries to provide for his family without getting swindled. It is certainly a folksy read and while I don’t normally enjoy such books, there is an honesty and authenticity to Perry’s writing that I appreciated.
While the early chapters move slowly, it is in the latter chapters where the story progresses and also when we witness Sam finally confronting his nemesis.
Okay the writing is not at the level Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath but the author was quite popular in Texas. So I’m glad that I read it and you are comfortable reading books about some very impoverished characters you will probably enjoy this one too.
3.5 stars
August 4, 2023
Review to follow
November 3, 2022
This book is set around 1940 on a hardscrabble farm run by tenants. It also involves a serious amount of of subsistent hunting and fishing. If this environment does not appeal to you, then you might have a difficult time with this book.
The central character is a poor and down on his luck man with a young family and who is hard-working and a fine human being asked to tackle the problem after problem with a inquisitive mind and a strong back. It’s a well told story that I enjoyed reading. It is also a glimpse into the life of Texas farm workers in those days.
I read it in two days. It’s a pretty short read and all in all heartwarming. For a book that won the national book award it sure has not had many readers here on Goodreads. I’m not sure why: it deserves more. My thanks to Howard and Dave for a heads up on this book.
The central character is a poor and down on his luck man with a young family and who is hard-working and a fine human being asked to tackle the problem after problem with a inquisitive mind and a strong back. It’s a well told story that I enjoyed reading. It is also a glimpse into the life of Texas farm workers in those days.
I read it in two days. It’s a pretty short read and all in all heartwarming. For a book that won the national book award it sure has not had many readers here on Goodreads. I’m not sure why: it deserves more. My thanks to Howard and Dave for a heads up on this book.
October 7, 2020
This book was originally published about 1941, but it takes place late in the 1930's. There are references to FDR's assistance programs established to aid agricultural workers and briefly mentions the possibility of war in Europe. The story follows Sam Tucker and his struggles to feed and clothe his family during the Great Depression while living near the San Pedro river in Texas.
This period in history has always interested me because my father came of age during the Great Depression and my mother was just a little kid during those years. Both of their families were poor, but nothing compared to what the Tucker family endures in this story.
Sam's gift is knowing how to work the land for maximum production but lacks money to purchase it. He strikes a deal with Ruston, who owns 68 acres of San Pedro bottom land to grow corn and cotton in return for wages (think nickels a day), and lodging in a small falling down shack (think hovel) for his family of five.
The trials, tribulations, and triumphs Sam and his family endure throughout the story made me both laugh and cry. Granny, Sam's constantly grumpy grandmother is a hoot (think Irene Ryan from Beverly Hillbillies.) Oh, and the family that helps Sam harvest the cotton? Their last name just happened to be Clampett.
On a more serious side note, this book speaks volumes of the hardships families had to overcome to survive the Great Depression. It makes me appreciate that much more the garden my father planted every year and the hunting and fishing he did when I was growing up. Like Sam, my dad never killed anything that couldn't be put on the dinner table, sold or traded, or used for fishing bait. And like Nona, Sam's wife, my mother spent many summers canning produce from my father's garden. Not a day goes by that I don't think about them. They are greatly missed.
Lastly, the author captures the vernacular perfectly in the way he writes the dialogue between characters. I don't think the story would be as authentic without it. If you like this period in history, then I highly recommend this book.
This period in history has always interested me because my father came of age during the Great Depression and my mother was just a little kid during those years. Both of their families were poor, but nothing compared to what the Tucker family endures in this story.
Sam's gift is knowing how to work the land for maximum production but lacks money to purchase it. He strikes a deal with Ruston, who owns 68 acres of San Pedro bottom land to grow corn and cotton in return for wages (think nickels a day), and lodging in a small falling down shack (think hovel) for his family of five.
The trials, tribulations, and triumphs Sam and his family endure throughout the story made me both laugh and cry. Granny, Sam's constantly grumpy grandmother is a hoot (think Irene Ryan from Beverly Hillbillies.) Oh, and the family that helps Sam harvest the cotton? Their last name just happened to be Clampett.
On a more serious side note, this book speaks volumes of the hardships families had to overcome to survive the Great Depression. It makes me appreciate that much more the garden my father planted every year and the hunting and fishing he did when I was growing up. Like Sam, my dad never killed anything that couldn't be put on the dinner table, sold or traded, or used for fishing bait. And like Nona, Sam's wife, my mother spent many summers canning produce from my father's garden. Not a day goes by that I don't think about them. They are greatly missed.
Lastly, the author captures the vernacular perfectly in the way he writes the dialogue between characters. I don't think the story would be as authentic without it. If you like this period in history, then I highly recommend this book.
September 8, 2011
Great Depression, East Texas, tenant farming... This book could easily have become a cliche, but it is NOT!! The "New Yorker" review of George Sessions Perry's 1942 work says it better than I could: "A miniature 'Grapes of Wrath' seen through optimistic glasses." I highly recommend this book to those who are looking for realistic fiction set in the 1930s.
You might expect a book containing Southern homilies, folklore, death & dying, crop planting, and such to be one that does not strike a single literary chord -- but with George Sessions Perry wielding the pen that's not the case. Just one brief quote, describing the end of the spring hunting season & the arrival of planting time: "And now it is time to do the thing with the earth, the thing that is still big and meaningful in your blood, because in yours, at least, time clocks, the factory whistle, the whir of machinery and stink of chemicals have, as yet, no place." Beautiful! And so true of Southern farmers in the 1930s. There was NO other life for them, & life was dealing them a pretty rough hand back then.
You might expect a book containing Southern homilies, folklore, death & dying, crop planting, and such to be one that does not strike a single literary chord -- but with George Sessions Perry wielding the pen that's not the case. Just one brief quote, describing the end of the spring hunting season & the arrival of planting time: "And now it is time to do the thing with the earth, the thing that is still big and meaningful in your blood, because in yours, at least, time clocks, the factory whistle, the whir of machinery and stink of chemicals have, as yet, no place." Beautiful! And so true of Southern farmers in the 1930s. There was NO other life for them, & life was dealing them a pretty rough hand back then.
October 5, 2020
Beautiful. Powerful. Dignity in work, in problem-solving, in creating something out of nothing. Fulfillment. Optimism without naïveté. Grace in the face of devastating economic downturn and bad luck. What a year to discover George Sessions Perry.
July 30, 2018
Great book; it was written about life in East Texas during the Great Depression, the same time and place my mother grew up. Her mother even died of pellagra (from malnutrition) when my mother was 7 years old, so I never knew my grandmother. The little boy in this book is wasting away from this same disease.
I loved this book so much that I mailed it to my 4 siblings; they are all reading and passing it on to the next. I hope to read Mr. Perry's other works. The story was heartbreaking in its depiction of the hard life our ancestors faced, but is sprinkled with great humor as well. Definitely 5 stars for me.
I loved this book so much that I mailed it to my 4 siblings; they are all reading and passing it on to the next. I hope to read Mr. Perry's other works. The story was heartbreaking in its depiction of the hard life our ancestors faced, but is sprinkled with great humor as well. Definitely 5 stars for me.
February 21, 2022
This book was a selection for a Texas-centric book club and one I never would have chosen on my own. BUT it is a wonderful book; a recording the speech, ways and rhythms of a poor East Texas farmer, Sam Tucker and his family during the 1930's. While not owning any farmland of his own, Sam takes pride in his work and the growing of crops even if it on someone else's land. He doesn't complain.
I give it a 4.5.
I give it a 4.5.
November 26, 2018
A Texas Bizarro version of Grapes of Wrath. Sam Tucker's can do spirit is infectious. My piss boiled on several occasions on behalf of the Tucker clan, but Sam's optimism brought me back. Beautiful story, but I remember the film version - The Southerner - being way more grueling.
September 27, 2020
I was assigned this book in a college class 20+ years ago. I found my copy again in the last year and read it again. Loved it then, love it now!
Want to read
September 28, 2022The Southerner (1945).
June 22, 2023
Big thanks to Howard (again) for alerting me to this book. You should read his wonderful review before you read this.
Hold Autunm in Your Hand is a year in the life of Sam Tucker as he struggles to support his family (wife, two children and grandmother) during the Great Depression. Tired of being a share cropper he takes over a sixty- eight farm in the San Pedro bottomland and works for six bits a day. Despite multiple setbacks Sam is always wonderfully optimistic and stoic. It’s his perspicacity that get him through.
“You somehow had the feeling, when with simple, laborious magic you were making good things out of dirt and time and weather, that you were paying your dues in that big association know as the human race“
Even when his toddler son is gravely ill with malnutrition Sam cheerfully finds a way (he borrows a cow for milk and spends his final pennies on old, but green vegetables).
He understands both the price of everything and the value of everything. The chapter where he makes syrup (to earn a little extra income) for Tiff Mosley is just tremendous. The book is full of wonderful characters, none more so than his Granny, who is a comical termagant. She is memorable for all the wrong reasons and a fantastic character .
George Sessions Perry wasn’t from the country, but spent time living with farmers during the Great Depression to help him write this book. He clearly saw the best in people and admired their resilience and their ability to survive. It’s a sympathetic and honest account. Hold Autumn in Your Hand won the National Book Award.
The author’s life took a downturn shortly after the book was finished, and tragically he never fully recovered.
I was genuinely sad at the end of the book because I’d really enjoyed sharing a year in the life of Sam Tucker, who became one of my favourite literary characters.
On the first page of my copy was a handwritten message, in copperplate:
“Jackie from Anne
1943
Send from the USA to my dear cousin”.
I don’t know who Jackie was, but I really hope that she enjoyed Hold Autumn in Your Hand as much as I did, nearly 80 years later.
Hold Autunm in Your Hand is a year in the life of Sam Tucker as he struggles to support his family (wife, two children and grandmother) during the Great Depression. Tired of being a share cropper he takes over a sixty- eight farm in the San Pedro bottomland and works for six bits a day. Despite multiple setbacks Sam is always wonderfully optimistic and stoic. It’s his perspicacity that get him through.
“You somehow had the feeling, when with simple, laborious magic you were making good things out of dirt and time and weather, that you were paying your dues in that big association know as the human race“
Even when his toddler son is gravely ill with malnutrition Sam cheerfully finds a way (he borrows a cow for milk and spends his final pennies on old, but green vegetables).
He understands both the price of everything and the value of everything. The chapter where he makes syrup (to earn a little extra income) for Tiff Mosley is just tremendous. The book is full of wonderful characters, none more so than his Granny, who is a comical termagant. She is memorable for all the wrong reasons and a fantastic character .
George Sessions Perry wasn’t from the country, but spent time living with farmers during the Great Depression to help him write this book. He clearly saw the best in people and admired their resilience and their ability to survive. It’s a sympathetic and honest account. Hold Autumn in Your Hand won the National Book Award.
The author’s life took a downturn shortly after the book was finished, and tragically he never fully recovered.
I was genuinely sad at the end of the book because I’d really enjoyed sharing a year in the life of Sam Tucker, who became one of my favourite literary characters.
On the first page of my copy was a handwritten message, in copperplate:
“Jackie from Anne
1943
Send from the USA to my dear cousin”.
I don’t know who Jackie was, but I really hope that she enjoyed Hold Autumn in Your Hand as much as I did, nearly 80 years later.
July 14, 2012
An impressive book which vividly and effectively captures the desperation and poverty of East Texas sharecroppers during the depression. It is not a long book, and as a result you'll find it a quick read. It is not particularly deep, but it is very effective at giving the reader a taste of life at this time.
Adding immense color to the book is Granny. She is quite a memorable character and livens up what would otherwise have been a rather dark book. Another stand-out, although for shorter duration is a young man who fervently claims to have seen a vision of Christ. I'm not sure why this is in the book, but it is interesting and rather absorbing.
If you prefer to not read profanity, know that there is some in here. It is not heavy and frequent, but you should be aware of it.
David.
Adding immense color to the book is Granny. She is quite a memorable character and livens up what would otherwise have been a rather dark book. Another stand-out, although for shorter duration is a young man who fervently claims to have seen a vision of Christ. I'm not sure why this is in the book, but it is interesting and rather absorbing.
If you prefer to not read profanity, know that there is some in here. It is not heavy and frequent, but you should be aware of it.
David.
June 18, 2010
George Sessions Perry is one of those authors who can make you feel you're there, living the joys and trials of his characters. Sam, with his wife Nona and two young children, is a tenant farmer in Depression-era Texas. It's through the eyes and muscle and surprising inner spirit of Sam that the reader enters into this family's life. It seems to me that their struggles to get by would defeat the rest of us. Sam draws strength, however, from his calling as a farmer and perhaps from the acceptance of his poverty. Coming from a farm background with its own share of struggles, I very much appreciated this book.
September 15, 2007
A sort of haunting book about a man who dreams of feeding his family with crops that he knows he can grow. His opposition is the post industrial revolution era he lives during, where sharecropping and debt peonage makes it exceedingly difficult for him to get by even when things go perfectly, and the prospect of being forced to turn his back on the land that calls to him in favor of an automobile assembly line job is a dark shadow in his possible future.
December 1, 2015
Surprisingly enjoyable, especially for a school read. Hold Autumn in Your Hand was reminiscent of an optimistic Grapes of Wrath. Set in Texas, the book follows a tenant farmer from the beginning of the planting season to the harvest, depicting the highs and lows of his life. Though the book has an optimistic tone, one can see that Sam Tucker's situation will never get better if he remains connected to the land, but if he leaves the land, he will lose his spirit.
September 2, 2016
This book manages to be always hopeful and always real in detail after detail. It was not written by a farmer, but a journalist who sympathized with the farming people with little to eat around Rockdale.
January 21, 2009
My Father gave me this book when I left home to go to Boarding School. His father gave it to him when he left for College. It is a wonderful read and helped me to understand the way that my Dad and his family was brought up. I loved it.
January 5, 2010
It has been 15 years, but I remember liking it. Poverty and pecans. Maybe pigs, too.
May 30, 2016
Classic Texas literature that transcends borders with its human spirit.
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