Destitution, hunger, cruelty, rootlessness-all the odds stand against Jacky Anderson, the young boy who struggles toward his adolescence in this powerful, popular American classic. Yet despite the hardships and hard times of the novel's Depression-era Kansas, Jacky prevails. Resourcefully, doggedly, on a journey that takes him from Wichita to Corpus Christi with his hapless mother and abusive stepfather, he nurtures his spirit of independence and capacity to love. Never failing to "tough it out" in his passage through the seedy worlds of the disappointed and dispossessed, Jacky may not escapr poverty but he does discover the possibility that lies in a nation's dream.