Compare And Contrast Out Of The Dust And The Worst Hard Time

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse and The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan are both great sources of information about the Dust Bowl during the ”Dirty Thirties. ”̣ However, they are very different in style. Out of the Dust is a fictional story written in a poem format and uses extensive figurative language. While The Worst Hard Time is more of a textbook format book that gives more in depth detail, background detail of the Dust Bowl, and uses eyewitness accounts to describe the horrors of the “Dirty Thirties.” Though these books are different styles and different genres they have many similarities, but they do have their differences. The Worst Hard Times focuses on historical facts provided by eyewitnesses. This book does not only record the “Dirty Thirties,” but it recounts the lives of the people living there before the Dust Bowl. For example, Egan writes about the life of Hazel Lucas when she was merely a child until the dirty incident when she had started a family of her own. Lucas’s excitement and fascination of her new home on …show more content…
It shows the fears these people actually had while living there and daily struggles that they faced. One of these that is made very clear is the dust. Throughout the book Hess voices Billie’s thoughts and fears of dust. She has nightmares of being covered and suffocated by dust. She runs away from home because she can not stand living in the dusty environment anymore. However, what makes these fears have even more gravity is the amount of times they use the word dust. To be exact the word dust is in this two hundred twenty-seven page book one-hundred fifty-six times. Some may say that it becomes repetitive, but I think that it gives the reader an accurate picture of how big a part of their lives dust was. Furthermore, the farther you get in the story the more it seems dust becomes its own