Dust Bowl
These nonfiction books include examinations of the Great Plains Dust Bowl during the 1930s and personal accounts of those who lived through it.
Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s
By Donald Worster
In the mid 1930s, North America's Great Plains faced one of the worst man-made environmental disasters in world history. Donald Worster's classic chronicle of the devastating years between 1929 and 1939 tells the story of the Dust Bowl in ecological as well as human terms. Donald Worster, a professor of history at the University of Kansas, is considered one of the fathers of environmental history.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
By Timothy Egan
Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction
The dust storms that terrorized America's High Plains in the darkest years of the Depression were like nothing ever seen before or since, and the stories of the people that held on have never been fully told. Timothy Egan follows a half-dozen families and their communities through the rise and fall of the region, going from sod huts to new framed houses to basements with the windows sealed by damp sheets in a futile effort to keep the dust out.
Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination
By Charles J. Shindo
More than any other event of the 1930s, the migration of thousands of jobless and dispossessed Americans from the Dust Bowl states to the "promised land" of California evokes the hardships and despair of the Great Depression. In this study, Charles Shindo shows how public memory of that migration has been dominated not by academic historians, but by a handful of artists and reformers. Shindo examines the images of Dust Bowl migrants in photography, fiction, film, and song, and marks off the various distances between these representations and the realities of migrant lives.
Next Year Country: Dust to Dust in Western Kansas, 1890-1940
By Craig Miner
Kansas Notable Book
Several generations of the Miner family have lived and farmed in Ness County, providing Craig Miner with a rich and very personal backdrop for this heartfelt and compelling portrait of western Kansas. In Next Year Country he recounts the resilience of his fellow Kansans through two depressions and the Dust Bowl, showing how the region changed dramatically over fifty years. In this striking regional history, Miner blends the voices of real people with writings of small-town journalists to show life as it was really lived from 1890 to 1940.
American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California
By James N. Gregory
American Exodus takes us back to the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and the war boom influx of the 1940s to explore the experiences of the more than one million Oklahomans, Arkansans, Texans, and Missourians who sought opportunities in California. Gregory reaches into the migrants' lives to reveal not only their economic trials, but also their impact on California's culture and society.
Farming the Dust Bowl: A First-Hand Account from Kansas
By Lawrence Svobida
This is the story of Lawrence Svobida, a Kansas wheat farmer who fought searing drought, wind, erosion, and economic hard times in the Dust Bowl. It is a vivid account by a farmer who pitted his physical strength, mental faculties, and financial resources against the environment as nature wreaked havoc across the southern Great Plains. Svobida's description of Dust Bowl agriculture is important not only because it accurately describes farming in that region, but also because it is one of the few first-hand accounts that remain of the frightening and still haunting dust-laden decade of the 1930s.
Waiting on the Bounty: The Dust Bowl Diary of Mary Knackstedt Dyck
Edited by Pamela Riney-Kehrberg
Mary Knackstedt Dyck farmed with her husband in Hamilton County, Kansas. This diary documents her experience on their farm from 1936-41 during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression.
Letters from the Dust Bowl
By Caroline Henderson; edited by Alvin O. Turner
Caroline Henderson's articles on the Oklahoma Dust Bowl began appearing in Atlantic Monthly in 1931, bringing national attention to the troubles of United States farmers. In Letters from the Dust Bowl, Alvin O. Turner has collected and edited Henderson's published materials and personal correspondence dating from 1908 to 1966. Turner supplements Henderson's work with a biographical essay and annotations to present a complete picture of this remarkable woman.
Book descriptions provided by BookLetters.
