Book Details
- Author: Timothy Egan
- Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
- Year: 2006
- Page Count: 352
Detailed Summary
The Worst Hard Time is a gripping work of narrative history that chronicles the human experience of the Dust Bowl during the 1930s. Egan traces the catastrophe back to ‘The Great Plow-Up,’ when government incentives and high wheat prices encouraged farmers to tear up the native grasslands of the Southern Plains, destroying the ecosystem that held the soil in place. When the drought hit in the early 1930s, the land literally began to blow away, creating ‘black blizzards’ that were arguably the worst environmental disaster in American history. Egan tells this story through the personal experiences of several families who chose to stay in the heart of the dust storms, refusing to flee even as their neighbors left for California. It is a story of environmental hubris, extreme economic hardship, and incredible human endurance during the depths of the Great Depression.
Chapter Breakdown
- Introduction: The Landscape of Opportunity
- The Great Plow-Up
- The Big Blow
- A World Made of Dust
- The Hard Times
- The Exodus
- Survival
- The Aftermath
Reviews & Excerpts
Scholarly Reviews
- New York Times: Egan’s history is a compelling, page-turning narrative… He captures the tragedy of a people who were seduced by the promise of the plains and ultimately betrayed by the very land they tried to tame.
- Washington Post: A harrowing and heartbreaking account… Egan writes with the skill of a novelist, yet his work is grounded in meticulous research.
Excerpts
- The dust was not just dirt; it was the soil itself, the very lifeblood of the plains, rising into the air in a vengeful shroud that blocked out the sun and choked the lungs of anyone who dared to breathe it.
- They were a stubborn people, rooted in the dirt of the plains like the buffalo grass they had once destroyed. To leave was to admit defeat, and for these survivors, defeat was a word that simply did not exist in their vocabulary.