Moon Over Manifest

Moon Over Manifest is Clare Vanderpoole’s Newbery-award-winning entry into a tradition of books set during the Great Depression. Stories set within the Great Depression investigate issues of class, poverty, and more. Moon Over Manifest is set within the Great Depression, and the country’s struggles make the various plights of Manifest’s people urgent and immediate.

Moon Over Manifest begins as Abilene is forced to separate from her father, Gideon, when she is 12 years old. While she believes the source of their separation is Gideon’s superstition that he is cursed, it is also significant that he must travel to a different state to find railroad work. Abilene separates from Gideon in May 1936, in the latter half of the Great Depression. Work was scarce, and any chance of income was not one to lightly reconsider. While world economies were on the path to recovery by 1936, the Great Depression did not fully come to a close until 1939, 10 years after it began (“Causes of the Great Depression.” Britannica).

The Great Depression began with a recession in the summer of 1929, brought about by a decline of spending and a decrease of industrial production in the US. Due to the worldwide economic connections through the gold standard, a standard at which a unit of currency is backed by a fixed quantity of gold, what began in the United States spread to countries all over the world to varying degrees of severity. The Depression was exacerbated by the panicked selling of stocks on Black Thursday, which led to the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, along with falling prices, rapidly increasing unemployment rates, and more (“Money: Gold Standard.” Britannica).

Shady’s bootlegging business serves as immediate evidence of the Great Depression, as he conducts illegal transactions with customers that include members of law enforcement within Manifest. The 18th Amendment passed in 1920—preventing the legal sale of alcohol in the US—led to bootlegging, or the illegal production and sale of liquor during the Great Depression. Any means of making a dollar was priority, and bootlegging operations were common across the country.

Other literary works set in the Great Depression look at the causes and consequences of the time through the varied experiences of their characters. John’s Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps the most iconic novel to come out of the period. Steinbeck was a social critic, an allegorist, and an advocate for the working class. His work, and others set in the same era, investigates the lives of the working class during severe economic downturn.

Another prominent novel that depicts the Depression era is Christopher Paul Curtis’s Bud, Not Buddy, which follows Bud Caldwell’s experience as a young Black boy who encounters racism and labor unification efforts typical of the era. Similarly, Stephen King’s The Green Mile explores the horrors of the time, including racism, segregation, dismal health care services, and the mistreatment of incarcerated individuals in the 1930s.

A common thread throughout all works that examine the Great Depression is the emphasis of the time’s sense of desperation. Characters are placed in desperate situations and must take drastic actions to escape—if they escape at all. Moon Over Manifest, along with other books set in the same period, show the consequences of choices that led to the Depression, as well as the drastic measures that people resorted to for survival.