The Dust Bowl In John Steinbeck's The Grapes Of Wrath

“‘Sure,’ cried the tenant men, ‘but it’s our land…We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours…’” (…). This line from John Steinbeck’s famous book The Grapes of Wrath spoke true for countless farmers during the 1930s. Farmers across the nation had to sit and watch as their family farms were destroyed by drought and dust storms. This tragic event became known as the Dust Bowl. The Dust Bowl, a term used for both the area affected by the severe droughts of the time and the event itself, is without a doubt one of the most grim and harrowing events in America’s history. It was one of the worst environmental disasters in the nation’s past, it destroyed the livelihood of millions, and it was a major contributor to the continuation of the Great Depression. …show more content…
The term “dust bowl” can be used for both a land area and as an event. As an area, the “dust bowl” was the land from the Midwest to the southern Plains severely hurt by a series of droughts and subsequent dust storm occurring from 1931 to 1939 (1., 10.). When used as a period of history, this term points to when from 1931 to 1939, droughts and dust storms ravaged most of the country, especially the American Midwest, and caused serious impacts across the nation (1.). These droughts, though often thought of as a single, long-lasting drought, was in truth, a series of four droughts (4.). They affected 75% of the country, with 27 states being extremely affected, including the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, northeastern New Mexico, southeastern Oklahoma, western Kansas, and southeastern Colorado (1., 5., 13.). Together, these two meanings come to create our image of the American Dust