'The Worst Hard Time' is a timely read for new hard times
Monday, April 12, 2010 at 20:40 A sweeping historical tale of those who didn’t go west to the California oil fields in the 1930’s, Pulitzer prize winning author Tim Egan’s 2005 story of the dustbowl- ‘The Worst Hard Time’ - reads like a grand piece of historical fiction.
My soon to be 93-year old Mother suggested the book.
She was born in a sod dugout house in Roger Mills County, Oklahoma -where Gen. George Armstrong Custers’ 7th Cavalry attacked Black Kettle’s Cheyenne village. Roger Mills County isn’t far from the Cimmaron Strip where Egan’s heros and villans live out their stories. She said this was the truest picture of those hard times, and that it even brought back memories - some unpleasant- of people she knew.
This a story that is beautiful, depressing, uplifting, tragic and completely American in scope.
Egan follows the story of several families who stayed to eke out a life on the vast prairie, where they had been promised all the riches that the offer of free land could possibly give folks with nothing but faith in hard work.
