The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, a non-fiction book by New York Times journalist Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize winning author who resides in Seattle. He currently contributes opinion columns to The New York Times as the paper's Pacific Northwest correspondent...

, tells the story of those who lived through The Great Depression's Dust Bowl

Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl, or the Dirty Thirties, was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936...

. Egan was awarded the 2006 Washington State Book Award

Washington State Book Award

The Washington State Book Awards are presented annually in recognition of notable books written by Washington authors in the previous year.This literary awards program was established in 1967 as the Governor's Writers Awards. The program was based at the Washington State Library in Olympia...

 in History/Biography and a 2006 National Book Award

National Book Award

The National Book Awards are a set of American literary awards. Started in 1950, the Awards are presented annually to American authors for literature published in the current year. In 1989 the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization which now oversees and manages the National Book...

for the book.

In the book, Egan attributes the Dust Bowl tragedy to reckless agricultural misuse of the land, and tells "vivid" and "poignant" stories about individual farmers and their families.

Bibliographic information