Sweet Hope (2011), an award-winning historical novel by Mary Bucci Bush, tells the story of Italian immigrants living in peonage on a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation in the early 1900s.

It was inspired by the experiences of Bush's grandmother, Pasquina Fratini Galavotti, who worked on the Sunnyside Plantation in Arkansas as a child.

When the sharecroppers stand up for the Italians, it triggers "a tragic chain of events that implicates individuals, families, company, town, and the justice system.

In 1907, the U.S. Department of Justice appointed Mary Grace Quackenbos to investigate complaints that workers in the South were being held in peonage.

[3] As a child, Mary Bucci Bush heard many stories about the Sunnyside plantation from her grandmother and great aunt, who had worked there as children.

[3] Although Bush is careful to note that Sweet Hope is a work of fiction, she dedicated it to "all the inhabitants of Sunnyside Plantation, Italian and African American, whose voices were never heard and whose stories were never told.

Thom Vernon of the Arkansas Review classes Sweet Hope with John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills, Pietro Di Donato's Christ in Concrete, and other notable works that give voice to the working poor.