The Worst Hard Time

A national book award winner, The Worst Hard Time tells the story of the “Dust Bowl”, probably the most devastating ecological disaster ever experienced in the United States. The High Plains of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico went through a bonanza of over-farming in the 1920s. When the rains stopped and the wind picked up in the early 1930s, the stripped earth began to stir and blow to devastating effect, sending millions of tons of dust across much of the nation. In the High Plains, the power of these blinding black blizzards of dust was such that it was often impossible to "see your hand in front of your face," according to one survivor.

In The Worst Hard Time, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Timothy Egan brilliantly captures the story of the Dust Bowl as seen through the eyes of the individuals who lived through the punishing storms that ravaged the American High Plains during the Depression. This chilling account not only tells how these storms affected humans and livestock and life itself in the Plains, but also describes in some detail the causes of the disaster and FDR's response to the hardship as part of the New Deal.