Dust & Dignity

DUST & DIGNITY
A Novel of the Great Depression

In the autumn of 1929, Thomas Morgan surveys his Oklahoma wheat fields with pride, confident that twenty years of sweat and determination have secured his family’s future. But when the stock market crashes and dust storms ravage the plains, Thomas watches helplessly as the bank forecloses on the land that defines him.

Uprooted and desperate, the Morgan family joins thousands of others on the westward migration to California. For Thomas, the journey is more than physical; it’s a painful reckoning with his understanding of manhood, worth, and dignity. His wife Harriet quietly holds the family together with practical resilience while their children—mechanically gifted Jesse and observant Kate—begin forging their own paths amid the chaos.

Meanwhile in Chicago, Howard Wilson, the banker overseeing rural foreclosures, finds his comfortable certainties crumbling as he confronts the human cost of economic collapse. When circumstance brings the Morgan and Wilson families together in a California migrant camp, ancient barriers of class and status give way to an unlikely alliance.

As industrial agriculture magnate Vincent Harrington schemes to exploit the crisis for profit, the families join with others to form an agricultural cooperative. Their experiment in collective survival challenges not just Harrington’s power but the deeper assumptions that enabled the catastrophe: that dignity depends on ownership, that worth comes from possession, that security requires control.

Through dust storms and hunger, strikes and solidarity, “Dust & Dignity” follows ordinary Americans discovering extraordinary capacity for adaptation and renewal. It’s a story of people finding unexpected strength when everything they trusted has failed—learning that what truly cannot be foreclosed upon is the human capacity for connection, purpose, and hope.