Dust to Eat (2021)

Dust to Eat depicts the remarkable story of Caroline Henderson through excerpts from her writing for national magazines and letters to her friends and daughter. A graduate of a leading liberal arts college, she embraced an agrarian vision to pioneer in the Oklahoma panhandle from 1907 until 1966. She always found much to love there but was never far from recurring droughts, dust storms, and similar disasters. Her reflections on those experiences for varied national magazines established a gold standard for writing about the great plains while her descriptions of the dust bowl continues to provide a foundation for understanding that event as well. But she had not set out to be a writer. Her dream had been to find fulfillment on the land she loved. What she found instead was "dust to eat."