How Green was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn (New York : Scribner, reprint 1997; originally published in 1939).
Richard Llewellyn’s How Green Was My Valley tells the touching story of a coal mining family in a Welsh village at the turn of the century. John Ford’s movie adaptation won the 1941 Academy Award for Outstanding Motion Picture.
“I have often stood outside the door looking down the Valley, seeing in my mind all the men coming up black with dust, and laughing in groups, walking bent-backed because the street is steep and in those days it was not cobbled.
The houses, of course, are the same now as they were then, made of stone from the quarries. There is a job they must have had carting all those blocks all those miles in carts and wains and not one road that you could call really good, because the land was all farms, then.” – from How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn