Postwar America was relatively flush, though certainly books about poor families were published, among them Eleanor Estes' The One Hundred Dresses, Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family books, and Gertrude Chandler Warner's Boxcar Children series. But it wasn't until the recession of the late 1970s that there was a strong resurgence in stories about economic woes.

Mildred D. Taylor's Newbery Medal-winning 1976 novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, distinguished itself by tying historic struggles to current events. It featured the triple-whammy of a Great Depression setting, a young black protagonist, and a civil rights plot. Narrated by 10-year-old Cassie Logan, the book may have been set in the 1930s, but it chronicled the kind of injustices—poverty, prejudice, hate crimes—that were highly relatable to kids born in or around the Summer of Love. Cassie's family teeters on the brink of solvency, and they ultimately have to sacrifice their own crops to prevent a lynching. The book's message to kids of the '70s was: If you think the Great Depression was just about a bunch of old white men losing their shirts in the stock market, think again.