Excerpts from "Letters from the Dust Bowl"

Originally published in The Atlantic Monthly, May 1936
Reprinted from Reader's Digest
Published in July 1936

"We can't hold out indefinitely without some income, however small. But if we can keep the taxes paid, we can work and hope for a better day."

Caroline A. Henderson

In 1930, the wheat farmers of the Great Plains, the vast middle space of the United States from North Dakota south to the Texas Panhandle, were relatively prosperous even as farmers struggled in other regions of the country. The spring of 1931 produced another record-breaking wheat crop. However, by summer of that year a drought that had begun in the eastern United States moved west to the Great Plains. The winter wheat crops planted in...