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Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of eight 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 and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice, a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington State Book Award winner, and a Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Book. He writes a weekly opinion column for The New York Times.
Timothy Egan's website
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Why a book on the Dust Bowl now?
The story of the people who lived through the nation's hardest economic
depression and its worst weather event is one of the great untold stories of the
Greatest Generation. To me, there was an urgency to get this story now because
the last of the people who lived through those dark years are in their final
days. It's their story, and I didn't want them to take this narrative of horror
and persistence to the grave. At the same time, this part of America the rural
counties of the Great Plains looks like it's dying. Our rural past seems so
distant, like Dorothy's Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. Yet it was within the
lifetime of people living today that nearly one in three Americans worked on a
farm. Now, the site of the old Dust Bowl which covers parts of five states
is largely devoid of young families and emptying out by the day. It's flyover
country to most Americans. But it holds this remarkable tale that should be a
larger part of our shared national story.
Do you see any parallels between the Dust Bowl and Hurricane Katrina, the
worst natural disaster of our time?
There are so many echoes of what happened in the 1930s and the ...
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