The Worst Hard Time
The Untold Story of Those
Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
The depression of the 1920’s was followed by the dust bowl of the 1930’s… those living in the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas and in western Kansas were the hardest hit and survival became a desperate test of endurance.
Many first person accounts were written about what it was like during that terrible period of time including Caroline Henderson’s personal correspondence detailing her experiences in the Oklahoma panhandle during the dust bowl in Letters from the Dust Bowl.
The grandchildren of John Gassett, a retired Tulsa attorney, enjoyed his stories about growing up in the dust bowl days and encouraged him to write them down in Little John: the Webb City Kid.
Another family’s dust bowl saga took place in Okemah, Oklahoma and is chronicled in A Boyhood in the Dust Bowl, 1924-1934, by Robert Allen Rutland.
Surviving the Dust Bowl (video recording) is a PBS American Experience telecast that features interviews with people who endured “a series of almost-Biblical scourges.”
Woody Guthrie’s stories of the dust bowl were written as songs and ballads in Dust Bowl Ballads (sound recording).
Fictionalized versions of the dust bowl are a popular theme in literature. The most famous of these is Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. You may want to re-read it if you haven’t picked it up since your high school or college English class.
A 13-year old narrator describes the tragic life of her Oklahoma farm family through poetry as they try to eke out a living in Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse.
Dorothy Garlock’ s Mother Road is the first in a series of novels by this author set on Route 66, the famed route to a better life in California.