Depicting a world where the struggle to survive is elemental, two incisive narratives have emerged to describe what life was like during the Dust Bowl. The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan includes a non-fiction depiction of life based on real characters and stories of people who had to live through one of the most difficult times in history. John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath offers a fictionalized depiction of what people would have experienced, creating the story of a family who had to transform their lives to adapt to what the Dust Bowl did in his struggle to find work and money. These two works paint a realistic picture of what life was like in the Dust Bowl, as they both included a single plot that followed several families in The Worst Hard Time and one family in The Grapes of Wrath, using a figurative language to emphasize certain points that were consistent in life during the Dust Bowl and created a clear tone that connected with the reader on a personal and emotional level. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay. These texts both employ a unique structure in each of their stories that offer multiple perspectives on life during the Dust Bowl. In The Worst Hard Time, there were several instances where the story passed between different families who had actually lived through the Dust Bowl. Egan said in an interview that The Worst Hard Time was the kind of story in which "[There was] no Social Security, no accurate predictions... They ate things like tumbleweeds – salted and canned – or roadkill, cooked over an open fire. » (Houghton Miffin Company 3). Egan describes their scenario in a very drastic but accurate manner, giving a fictionalized depiction of what the Dust Bowl was like. In The Grapes of Wrath, there was a clear distinction between the fictional aspect of the majority of the story, following Tom Joad's unique family and their struggles during the Dust Bowl, as well as the interior chapters of the story which included real information and context from the actual Dust Bowl era, about which Steinbeck commented in an interview: "You say that the interior chapters were counterpoint and so they were - that they changed the rhythm and they were too, but the basic purpose was to hit the reader below the belt... Open him [to] things on an intellectual level that he would not or could not receive if he was not open” (New York Times 2). Steinbeck includes the story of a family experiencing a realistic scenario during the Dust Bowl, as well as these interior chapters that gave the reader a deeper understanding of that era. In these two texts, Egan and Steinbeck included many examples of innovative figurative language that emphasized certain points to the reader and gave new perspectives on certain concepts. At one point in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck writes, “Tractors moved on the roads and in the fields, great caterpillars moving like insects” (35). In this quote, Steinbeck uses a simile to describe the tractors that caused people to leave their homes during the dustbin, comparing their way of walking with that of insects. He also uses metaphor to compare important concepts to the story, for example: “He was part of the monster, a robot in the seat” (Steinbeck 35). In this quote, the tractor driver is compared to a robot, which is part of this monster, giving the reader an understanding of how.