Dust girl

Author’s Note

No story springs to life in a vacuum. This one, however, has a longer history and more sources than much of what I’ve written before.

The story really started back when I was a kid listening to Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl ballads while reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. It came to life under the influence of The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression by Errol Lincoln Uys, Rising from the Rails: Pullman Porters and the Making of the Black Middle Class by Larry Tye, and Jazz by Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux. Frequently, the most powerful influences for an author are novels, and two were very much in my mind as I worked on this book: They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Horace McCoy’s chilling story of dance marathons during the Depression, and The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. I also was able to draw on the eyewitness accounts collected by the Dust Bowl Oral History Project of the Ford County Historical Society (skyways.org/orgs/fordco/dustbowl/) and the writings and images compiled by Kansas State University (weru.ksu.edu/new_weru/multimedia/dustbowl/dustbowlpics.html), as well as Farming the Dust Bowl: A First-Hand Account from Kansas by Lawrence Svobida, and of course the photographs taken by Dorothea Lange.

Oh, and just for the record-I did not make up the Fairyland amusement park in Kansas City. I found it in the book Kansas City Jazz: From Ragtime to Bebop-A History by Frank Driggs and Chuck Haddix. So thanks, gentlemen: you made me rewrite the entire second half of the story.