The Great Depression

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The Great Depression was an economic disaster in North America, Europe, and other industrialized areas of the world that began in 1929 and lasted until about 1939. It was the longest and most severe depression ever experienced by the industrialized Western world.

Many say that The Great Depression began with the collapse of stock-market prices on the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929, although the U.S. economy had gone into depression six months earlier. During the next three years stock prices in the United States continued to fall, until by late 1932 they had dropped to only about 20 percent of their value in 1929.

The Great Depression began in the United States but soon turned into a worldwide economic problem due to the relationships that had been created between the United States and European economies after World War I. After the war, the United States had became a major creditor and financier of postwar Europe, whose national economies had been weakened by the war itself, by war debts, and, in the case of Germany and other defeated nations, by the need to pay war reparations.

This historical catastrophe is important to the setting and plot of both Out of the Dust and Roll of Thunder.