Texas. 1921: A time of abundance. Elsa Wolcott meets Rafe Martinelli and changes the direction of her life. Her only choice: marriage to a man she barely knows. 1934: Millions are out of work and a drought has broken the Great Plains. Farmers are fighting to keep their land and their livelihoods as the crops are failing, the water is drying up, and dust threatens to bury them all. Elsa Martinelli, like so many of her neighbors, must make an agonizing...

After fleeing the Oklahoma Dust Bowl, the Joad family finds the conditions in California are almost as bad, as people fight for jobs and their own day-to-day survival.

A lengthy California drought escalates to catastrophic proportions, turning Alyssa's quiet suburban street into a warzone, and she is forced to make impossible choices if she and her brother are to survive.

"After a two-year drought, the Kerrigan ranch is dry as a bone and as dusty as a honky-tonk bible. On the brink of ruin, Kate Kerrigan hires the rainmaker Professor Somerset Lazarus, who promises salvation--in the form of a deluge. Kate is desperate enough to try anything. But when four angry gunmen show up, ready to lynch the phony rainmaker for swindling them out of their money, the Kerrigans have to choose sides fast--before the bullets start to...

"Drought has transfigured Southern California into a surreal, phantasmagoric landscape. Most of the Southwest has been evacuated. Luz and Ray are holdouts, squatting in a starlet's abandoned mansion and subsisting on rationed cola and whatever they can loot, scavenge, and improvise, their love somehow blooming in this arid place. But when they cross paths with a mysterious child, and the thirst for a better future begins."--

Twelve-year-old Della Kelly of Maryville, North Carolina, tries to come to terms with her mother's mental illness while her father struggles to save the farm from a record-breaking drought.

Describes the plight of the migrant workers who traveled from the Dust Bowl to California during the Depression and were forced to live in a federal labor camp and discusses the school that was built for their children.

The causes and results of the Dust Bowl and how the lessons learned are still used today.