The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl is a work of history by Timothy Egan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The New York Times. During the Great Depression, vast dust storms swept across the High Plains, burying farms, darkening the sky at midday and making people and animals sick. Egan follows about half a dozen families and their communities through the region's rise and collapse, from the boom years when settlers plowed up the grasslands to the decade when the soil blew away. He describes families moving from sod houses to new homes and then sealing their windows with damp sheets against the black blizzards, as crops failed and loved ones died. Drawing on interviews with survivors, many of them in their eighties and nineties, the book tells a story of endurance on the land. It won the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction.