The Worst Hard Time Literary Elements

Non fiction

The story takes place in the High Plains starting from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century.

The story is narrated from a third person subjective point of view.

The tone is generally neutral, with the author presenting the facts in a detached way.

The protagonists are the poor farmers in the High Plains and the antagonists are the dust storms they had to endure.

The major conflict is between the people who tried to stop the farmers from farming intensively and to teach them to behave in a controlled manner and the business people who tried to push the people to farm even more extensively and to produce more and more.

The story reaches its climax during the Black Sunday, the day when the harshest sand storm hit the High Plains.

In the first chapter, Long, a man sent to look at the land wrote that it was not suitable for people who relied on agriculture to survive. His words foreshadows the problems the people who went there hoping to live off agriculture had to go through.

When the people in the High Plains claimed they will not be affected by the Great Depression is an understatement as the people in the High Plains were just as affected, if not even more, as the rest of the country.

Some of the people who lived in the Great Plains tried to understand why the land was suddenly becoming barren. Some of the people living there claimed the soil was turning bad because they were not supposed to live there. Before the while population moved in the White Plains, it was an area inhabited by Indians who lived by hunting. Many believed the white people were punished for stealing the land from the Indians and some of the people interviewed allude to this way of thinking as well.

An important imagery is that of wheat, rotting away near the railways. The author notes that after many years of excellent harvest, the prices dropped so much and the production increased so much that farmers could no longer sell their produce. The grains remained more than often near railway tracks from one year to another, until the piles were made even bigger by that year’s harvest.

One of the paradoxes the farmers had to deal with is how even though they produced more wheat than ever, they struggled to stay alive. During the times when they were supposed to make big profit, they made almost nothing and had to leave their farms.

In the fourth chapter, the author draws a parallel between some lands in Russia that were considered as being inhabitable and the High Plains. In Russia, the czar tried to make his people move on a harsh piece of land in the 16th century. When he realized that the people would not move there, he gave away the land for free to German immigrants. In a similar way, the American government gave the land away for free in the beginning to whoever wanted to try his luck on it. However, while the Russians were highly successful in their attempts, the American faced more problems and suffered a great deal of losses.

The term the High Plains is a generic term to refer to an extended zone of grass stretching over Wyoming, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle.

In the introduction, when the narrator talks about the human settlements in the Great Plain ‘’The town has slipped away, dying at some point without funeral or proper burial.’’