John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath remains such an iconic fictional portrait of the effects of the Dust Bowl on victims already suffering as a result of the Great Depression in middle America in the 1930s that it can be difficult to even conceive of how people dealt with those two-fisted blows of hardship by choosing to remain there rather than leaving in search of greener pastures and better times. Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time thus can become for many their first exposure to this underreported aspect of Great Depression biography.
Egan’s process of making the stories of those who chose to remain behind while so many friends and family members heeded Horatio Alger’s advice to “Go west” may seem somewhat familiar to viewers of the documentaries of Ken Burns. Egan pieces together a collective narrative out individual parts that includes diaries, personal histories of actual survivors, newspaper articles and even manages to track down first-person accounts that were self-published by the authors themselves. Key to tying all these subjective memories together produce a unifying sense of objective factual history are the public records that also provide valuable insight into the ways that the universal term “Dust Bowl” impacted Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and Colorado in ways unique to their situations.
While focusing on the stories of how those who stayed behind managed to survive the years of hopelessness that the misery would ever end. That misery is not just located in the natural disaster that devastated private farming, but extends to failures of government response and the impact of capitalist greed descending upon those at the most vulnerable point in their lives with an even greater and longer-lasting force than the forces of nature that launched the whole disaster. The chronological structure of the book that reveals how it finally did also provides the foundation for presenting evidence of his argument that ill-conceived decision-making on the part of human beings contributed to the natural forces that that intensified cyclical weather events into a national tragedy. The Worst Time Hard earned Egan the 2006 National Book Award for Non-Fiction.
