His sources were “mostly women, because women are the best storytellers,” he said.Įgan said every character in the book is a real person. Those who were willing to speak to him usually gathered in someone’s living room. He would ask if anyone was alive from the 1930s. To write the book, Egan went to towns in what was known as “No Man’s Land” on the plains. “The one thing that had given them prosperity had turned on them,' Egan said. However, with the crash of the wheat market and the start of the depression, many found themselves with nothing. When those settlers first came, the land was bountiful. They came from having nothing to owning a piece of land, and they didn’t want to give it up.

Most had settled in the area through a modified Homestead Act, which doubled the amount of land they could claim from one-half of a square mile to a full square mile. However, Egan said, two million of them stayed. At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered close to one hundred million acres, and more than a quarter of a million Americans were forced to flee their ruined homes. In the 1930s, brutally punishing dust storms ravaged the American High Plains, including Southwestern Kansas, during the Great Depression. He received the National Book Award in nonfiction for “The Worst Hard Time.” During the fall 2018 semester, the book will be a part of various disciplines ranging from English to WU101, a first-year experience class.Įgan is a national enterprise reporter for The New York Times. All incoming first-year Washburn students were introduced to the book at summer orientation events and encouraged to read the book over the summer. “It’s a triumphant story just in the resiliency of the people who lived it,” he said.Įgan’s book was selected for the university’s iREAD program. He addressed hundreds of people gathered Tuesday evening at Washburn University’s Lee Arena to talk about his book “The Worst Hard Time,' which chronicles the people who lived through the worst weather event in American history - the Dust Bowl.

Timothy Egan describes himself as a storyteller and a time traveler.

The worst hard time book