Document Type
Book Review
Publication Date
2003
Publication Title
Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography
Volume
10
Issue
4
First Page
383
Last Page
385
Abstract
The American ‘Dust Bowl’ landscape of the 1930s has been etched into the global imagination through powerful narratives: Farm Security Administration photography (1935–43), Per Loretz’s film, The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), and John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939). In the last quarter of the twentieth century, historians such as Donald Worster (1979) have constructed their own narratives of this time and place. Caroline Henderson’s Letters from the Dust Bowl, edited by Alvin O. Turner, provides a counterpoint, in the form of a first-hand account and a woman’s voice, to the news stories, government propaganda, and historians’ analyses that construct our understanding of the Dust Bowl. Henderson’s letters reveal not only the ‘real’ experience of living in that place during a particularly difficult time, but also the ‘before’ and ‘after’–what led these individuals to the Great Plains and what became of them afterward.
Recommended Citation
Dando, Christina E., "Book Review of Letters from the Dust Bowl by Caroline Henderson" (2003). Geography and Geology Faculty Publications. 25.
https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/geoggeolfacpub/25
Comments
This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography in 2003, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0966369032000153340.