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Timothy
Egan
Photo Credit: Lorenzo Ciniglio |
Timothy Egan
The Worst Hard Time:
The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great
American Dust Bowl
Houghton
Mifflin About
the Book
Told through
the eyes of those who survived it, this is the
untold story of the Dust Bowl, the decade of brutally
punishing dust storms that ravaged the American
High Plains during the Depression.
About the Author
Timonthy
Egan is a national enterprise reporter for The
New York Times. In 2001, he was part of a
team of reporters awarded the Pulitzer Prize for
the paper’s series exploring racial experiences
and attitudes across contemporary America. He
is the author of four books, including The
Good Rain and Lasso the Wind. He
lives in Seattle.
Suggested Links
www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com
Listen to Egan
reading an excerpt from The Worst Hard Time
on NPR.
www.npr.org
Backlist
- The Good Rain,
Knopf Publishing Group
- Lasso the Wind,
Knopf Publishing Group
Excerpt from THE WORST HARD
TIME, by Timothy Egan
Copyright
© 2006 by Timothy Egan.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
A Sunday in mid-April
1935 dawned quiet, windless, and bright. In the
afternoon, the sky went purple — as if it
were sick — and the temperature plunged.
People looked northwest and saw a ragged-topped
formation on the move, covering the horizon. The
air crackled with electricity. Snap. Snap.
Snap. Birds screeched and dashed for cover.
As the black wall approached, car radios clicked
off, overwhelmed by the static. Ignitions shorted
out. Waves of sand, like ocean water rising over
a ship’s prow, swept over roads. Cars went
into ditches. A train derailed.
Jeanne Clark had been
outside playing when her mother called to her,
panic in her voice.
“It was like I
was caught in a whirlpool,” she says. “All
of a sudden it got completely dark. I couldn’t
see a thing.”
That was Black Sunday,
April 14, 1935, day of the worst duster of them
all. The storm carried twice as much dirt as was
dug out of the earth to create the Panama Canal.
The canal took seven years to dig; the storm lasted
a single afternoon. More than 300,000 tons of
Great Plains topsoil was airborne that day. For
weeks afterward, eight-year-old Jeanne Clark could
not stop coughing. She was taken to the hospital,
where dozens of other children, as well as many
elderly patients, were spitting up fine particles.
The doctor diagnosed Jeanne with dust pneumonia,
the brown plague, and said she might not live
for long. Jeanne’s mother had trouble believing
the doctor’s words. She had come here for
the air, and now her little girl was dying of
it.
The narrative of
those times is not just buried among fence posts
and mummified homesteads. People who lived through
the whole thing — the great town-building,
farm-fattening, family establishing prosperity
of the 1920s, followed by the back hand of nature
in the next decade, when all of life played out
as if filmed grainy black-and-white — are
with us still, shelters of living memory. But
before the last witnesses fade away, they have
a story to tell.
Copyright ©
2006 by Timothy Egan.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
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