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Timothy Egan biography

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Timothy Egan
Sophie Egan

Timothy Egan

Timothy Egan Biography

Timothy Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and the author of eight books, most recently The Immortal Irishman, a New York Times bestseller. His book on the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time, won a National Book Award for nonfiction and was named a New York Times Editors' Choice, a New York Times Notable Book, a Washington State Book Award winner, and a Book Sense Book of the Year Honor Book. He writes a weekly opinion column for The New York Times.

Timothy Egan's website

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Interview

Timothy Egan discusses his National Book Award winning work of non-fiction, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived The Great American Dust Bowl; he talks about the people he interviewed, the trigger events that led up to the 10-year drought and whether history is likely to repeat itself.

Why a book on the Dust Bowl now?

The story of the people who lived through the nation's hardest economic depression and its worst weather event is one of the great untold stories of the Greatest Generation. To me, there was an urgency to get this story now because the last of the people who lived through those dark years are in their final days. It's their story, and I didn't want them to take this narrative of horror and persistence to the grave. At the same time, this part of America — the rural counties of the Great Plains — looks like it's dying. Our rural past seems so distant, like Dorothy's Kansas in The Wizard of Oz. Yet it was within the lifetime of people living today that nearly one in three Americans worked on a farm. Now, the site of the old Dust Bowl — which covers parts of five states — is largely devoid of young families and emptying out by the day. It's flyover country to most Americans. But it holds this remarkable tale that should be a larger part of our shared national story.

Do you see any parallels between the Dust Bowl and Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster of our time?

There are so many echoes of what happened in the 1930s and the ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Timothy Egan at BookBrowse
A Fever in the Heartland jacket The Immortal Irishman jacket Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher jacket The Big Burn jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Timothy Egan but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Mark Adams

    Mark Adams

    Mark Adams is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Meet Me in Atlantis and Turn Right at Machu Picchu. A writer for many national magazines, including GQ, Men's Journal, and New York, he lives near New York City with ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

    Try:
    Tip of the Iceberg
    by Mark Adams

  • C. Morgan Babst

    C. Morgan Babst

    C. Morgan Babst is a native of New Orleans. She studied writing at NOCCA, Yale, and NYU, and her essays and short fiction have appeared in Garden and Gun, The Oxford American, Guernica, the Harvard Review, Lenny Letter, and ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    The Worst Hard Time

    Try:
    The Floating World
    by C. Morgan Babst

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