A Long Way from Chicago

Richard Peck was an acclaimed author of literature for young readers. Though he would live most of his adult life in New York City, Peck was born and raised in Decatur, Illinois. He grew up hearing his father’s stories of life in the country, which served as inspiration for the stories Peck would go on to write. Peck’s mother read to him often, further cementing his love for stories and literature. Peck attended college at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana, earning a BA in English Literature. After serving in the United States Army for two years in Germany, he returned to the U.S., earning a master’s degree in English. He taught high school English in Illinois for a time before moving to New York City to teach. Peck credits his experience as a teacher with inspiring him to write, and in 1972 he published his first novel, Don’t Look and it Won’t Hurt, about teen pregnancy. Peck would go on to become an acclaimed author of young-adult literature, though he published books for adult readers, as well. For his young-adult literature, Peck received prestigious awards such as the Newbery Medal and the National Humanities Medal. Peck died in May 2018 in New York City at age 84.  

A Long Way from Chicago takes place in the American Midwest during the Great Depression, a major global recession that lasted from 1929 until 1939. The Depression is generally thought to have begun with the Wall Street crash of 1929. At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States economy was the largest in the world, and the stock market crash created a ripple effect that spread throughout the global economy. The period saw unprecedented levels of unemployment and poverty throughout the world. At the height of the Great Depression, unemployment rates rose to 25 percent. U.S. President Herbert Hoover’s reluctance to intervene in the economy only worsened the Depression, which only began to improve after the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. Roosevelt did not share Hoover’s reluctance to intervene in the economy and instead pushed New Deal programs, creating jobs and providing economic relief to struggling families. Though economic conditions improved under Roosevelt, it would be over a decade before the economy recovered to the state it had been in prior to the Wall Street crash.

Richard Peck was a prolific author who published dozens of novels (as well as several works of nonfiction), over the course of his career, mostly for middle-grade and young-adult readers. A Long Way from Chicago (1998), which is among Peck’s best-known works, earned him the Newbery Honor in 1999. Peck published a sequel, A Year Down Yonder, which takes place in 1938. It follows the story of Mary Alice, now 15 years old, after her parents send her to live with Grandma Dowdel due to financial struggles they face during the Great Depression. The novel won the Newbery Award in 2001. A Long Way and Yonder are both works of historical fiction, and so is Peck’s 2003 novel The River Between Us, which is set in the lead-up to the Civil War and follows a Union-supporting family who take in as boarders a pair of mysterious strangers who arrive via steamboat one night. Other works of historical fiction for young readers set during the Great Depression include Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse and Esperanza Rising by Pam Muñoz Ryan. A Long Way from Chicago is a novel told in interconnected short stories. Both Louis Sachar’s Sideways Stories from Wayside School and Jason Reynolds’s Look Both Ways have a similar structure and are also written for younger audiences.