The Book Prize Index

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

Timothy Egan

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl is an American history book written by New York Times journalist Timothy Egan and published by Houghton Mifflin in 2006. It tells the problems of people who lived through The Great Depression's Dust Bowl, as a disaster tale. Egan and The Worst Hard Time won the 2006 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2006 Washington State Book Award in History/Biography. 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.

HistoryAmerican History · medium confidenceAmerican History81 signalsLlm Classifier: American History -> American HistoryOpen Library: United states, history, 1919-1933 -> BiographyOpen Library: United states, history, 1933-1945 -> BiographyBusiness Biography

Award History

1 wins · 1 total

AwardYearResultCategory / Notes
National Book Award for NonfictionMajor2006WinnerSecondary source
View all award history (1)
Experimental book profileGenerated by GPT-5.4 nano · may contain inaccuracies

This is an unverified interpretation of the catalog description, offered as an opt-in discovery experiment—not as bibliographic fact.

  1. 01 Central figures

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

  2. 02 Central places

    None extracted with sufficient confidence.

    These suggestions did not meet the normal display threshold and are more likely to be wrong.

    • Great American Dust Bowl55%

  3. 03 Suggested argument

    The Dust Bowl tragedy is attributed to reckless agricultural misuse of the land, and survivors’ experiences are presented through vivid stories of individual farmers and their families.

    Model confidence 70%

  4. 04 Reading orientation

    35 / 100 academic

    Serious trade

    An estimate of intended readership and scholarly apparatus—not quality or importance.

Confidence percentages are the model's own estimates. Profile confidence: 65%.