About the Author

TIMOTHY EGAN is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of eight other books, most recently The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for nonfiction. His account of photographer Edward Curtis, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, won the Carnegie Medal for nonfiction. He writes a biweekly opinion column for the New York Times.

Reviews

[A] fierce, humane account of the dreams and extremes that crashed head on during the nearly decade-long calamity of the Dust Bowl. The New York Times [A] vivid and gritty piece of forgotten history.
USA Today "The Worst Hard Time" provides a sobering, gripping account of a disaster whose wounds are still not fully healed today.
Boston Globe The Worst Hard Time is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction.
The Baltimore Sun Egan has admirably captured a part of our American experience that should not be forgotten.
The San Francisco Chronicle Egan is a passionate and accomplished writer...Read this for history, not inspiration or entertainment.
The Denver Post Egan's account of the Dust Bowl era is a final, terrible rebuke to the policies of America's dying days of frontier expansion.
The Seattle Times THE WORST HARD TIME is a flat-out masterpiece of historical reportage.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer --

Egan tells an extraordinary tale in this visceral account of how America's great, grassy plains turned to dust, and how the ferocious plains winds stirred up an endless series of "black blizzards" that were like a biblical plague: "Dust clouds boiled up, ten thousand feet or more in the sky, and rolled like moving mountains" in what became known as the Dust Bowl. But the plague was man-made, as Egan shows: the plains weren't suited to farming, and plowing up the grass to plant wheat, along with a confluence of economic disaster-the Depression-and natural disaster-eight years of drought-resulted in an ecological and human catastrophe that Egan details with stunning specificity. He grounds his tale in portraits of the people who settled the plains: hardy Americans and immigrants desperate for a piece of land to call their own and lured by the lies of promoters who said the ground was arable. Egan's interviews with survivors produce tales of courage and suffering: Hazel Lucas, for instance, dared to give birth in the midst of the blight only to see her baby die of "dust pneumonia" when her lungs clogged with the airborne dirt. With characters who seem to have sprung from a novel by Sinclair Lewis or Steinbeck, and Egan's powerful writing, this account will long remain in readers' minds. (Dec. 14) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

[A] fierce, humane account of the dreams and extremes that crashed head on during the nearly decade-long calamity of the Dust Bowl. The New York Times [A] vivid and gritty piece of forgotten history.
USA Today "The Worst Hard Time" provides a sobering, gripping account of a disaster whose wounds are still not fully healed today.
Boston Globe The Worst Hard Time is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction.
The Baltimore Sun Egan has admirably captured a part of our American experience that should not be forgotten.
The San Francisco Chronicle Egan is a passionate and accomplished writer...Read this for history, not inspiration or entertainment.
The Denver Post Egan's account of the Dust Bowl era is a final, terrible rebuke to the policies of America's dying days of frontier expansion.
The Seattle Times THE WORST HARD TIME is a flat-out masterpiece of historical reportage.
Seattle Post-Intelligencer --