Climate Change of Mind: Revisiting Dust Bowl Narratives in a Time of Climate Catastrophe

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes the approaches that novelists have used to write about the 1930s Dust Bowl on the Great Plains, with particular attention to how writers have made this broad environmental disaster legible through its impacts on humans living in the affected regions. Far from merely portraying this historical “climate change,” novelists such as John Steinbeck and Sanora Babb instead sought to shape public opinions about this crisis by emphasizing the human cost of this environmental disaster and its ensuing migration. This dissertation furthermore applies these lessons from the past to contemporary climate destabilization, as it argues that effective writing about climate change must foreground the impacts on people affected by it.