Between 1930 and 1940, catastrophic wind erosion across the southern Great Plains of the United States — particularly in the Oklahoma Panhandle, the Texas Panhandle, southeastern Colorado, and southwestern Kansas — created the Dust Bowl, the worst human-caused ecological disaster in American history. Decades of aggressive ploughing of native grassland, combined with severe drought, left millions of acres of exposed topsoil vulnerable to the fierce plains winds, which lifted the soil into massive black blizzards that turned day into night and drove an estimated 3.5 million people from their homes. The disaster was a turning point in American environmental consciousness.

The Dust Bowl generated one of the defining literary responses to environmental catastrophe in American literary history: John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939) opened with a celebrated chapter of sustained wind description that is among the most powerful prose poems of ecological destruction in English. Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940), recorded in New York, used folk song as a vehicle for documenting the wind's social devastation and gave voice to the displaced Okies in a fusion of poetry and politics. The Dust Bowl permanently shaped the American literary imagination of wind as an agent of economic ruin and social displacement.