The Dust Bowl began in the early 1930s when drought, high winds, and poor farming practices devastated the Great Plains. Dust storms destroyed crops, buried homes, and forced many families to migrate west. The crisis linked ecological misuse with economic depression.

The Dust Bowl shaped American poetry, song, and fiction through images of dust, migration, hunger, and endurance. Woody Guthrie's songs and writers such as John Steinbeck made environmental collapse a central language of social protest and working-class memory.