Overview

George Earle returns from college to his Oklahoma birthplace and finds it drastically altered. The Dust Bowl and the Depression have transformed the bucolic farmtown into a desolate wasteland where few are healthy, happy, or employed. A chance encounter with Pretty Boy Floyd lands him in jail with a melancholy pulp literary agent named Hart. They're given one chance to avoid execution by accepting an unlikely task: find local powerbroker Doc Bennett's wayward daughter. They head east and meet migrants, vagabonds, rail-riders, rainmakers, a few destined to become famous, a few too dangerous to live, and the most ghoulish acts of a starved population while attempting to fulfill their impossible mission. ""Wow! That was all I could say when I finished devouring William Bernhardt's Challengers of the Dust. Readers beware, hold on tight for this roller-coaster ride that starts and ends in Oklahoma's No Man's Land of the Dust Bowl 1930s. Along the way you will meet con artists, maniacs, daredevils, cannibals, and an array of so many famous and infamous personalities that Forrest Gump's celebrity encounters pale in comparison Mr. Bernhardt, you have done it again. Don't quit now. More please. -Michael Wallis, Pretty Boy: The Life and Times of Charles Arthur Floyd.

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9781964832258

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WILLIAM BERNHARDT is the bestselling author of more than sixty books, including The Florentine Poet, The Game Master, the popular Ben Kincaid and Daniel Pike courtroom novels, and Nemesis: The Final Case of Eliot Ness. Bernhardt founded WriterCon, which hosts writing workshops and small-group retreats, an annual conference, and also offers a newsletter and magazine on Substack. His programs have educated more than three dozen now-published authors. He holds a master's degree in English literature, has won the Oklahoma Book Award twice, and has received the Southern Writers Guild's Gold Medal Award, the Royden B. Davis Distinguished Author Award (University of Pennsylvania), and the H. Louise Cobb Distinguished Author Award (Oklahoma State), which is given ""in recognition of an outstanding body of work that has profoundly influenced the way in which we understand ourselves and American society at large."" In addition to the novels, he has written plays, a musical (book and music), humor, nonfiction, children's books, biography, poetry, and crossword puzzles. He is a member of PEN International and the Academy of American Poets.

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