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Challengers of the Dust
In 1935, George Earle returned from college to his Oklahoma birthplace to find 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 meeting 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.
- GenresHistorical Fiction
Paperback
Published January 1, 2016
12 people are currently reading
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About the author
William Bernhardt
96 books514 followersWilliam Bernhardt is the author of over sixty books, including the bestselling Daniel Pike and Ben Kincaid legal thrillers, the historical novels Challengers of the Dust and Nemesis, three books of poetry, and the ten Red Sneaker books on fiction writing.
In addition, Bernhardt founded the Red Sneaker Writers Center to mentor aspiring writers. The Center hosts an annual writers conference (WriterCon), small-group seminars, a monthly newsletter, and a bi-weekly podcast. More than three dozen of Bernhardt’s students have subsequently published with major houses. He is also the owner of Balkan Press, which publishes poetry and fiction as well as the literary journal Conclave.
Bernhardt 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." He has been nominated for the Oklahoma Book Award eighteen times in three different categories, and has won the award twice. Library Journal called him “the master of the courtroom drama.” The Vancouver Sun called him “the American equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer.”
In addition to his novels and poetry, he has written plays, a musical (book and score), humor, children stories, biography, and puzzles. He has edited two anthologies (Legal Briefs and Natural Suspect) as fundraisers for The Nature Conservancy and the Children’s Legal Defense Fund. OSU named him “Oklahoma’s Renaissance Man.”
In his spare time, he has enjoyed surfing, digging for dinosaurs, trekking through the Himalayas, paragliding, scuba diving, caving, zip-lining over the canopy of the Costa Rican rain forest, and jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. In 2013, he became a Jeopardy! champion winning over $20,000.
When Bernhardt delivered the keynote address at the San Francisco Writers Conference, chairman Michael Larsen noted that in addition to penning novels, Bernhardt can “write a sonnet, play a sonata, plant a garden, try a lawsuit, teach a class, cook a gourmet meal, beat you at Scrabble, and work the New York Times crossword in under five minutes.”
In addition, Bernhardt founded the Red Sneaker Writers Center to mentor aspiring writers. The Center hosts an annual writers conference (WriterCon), small-group seminars, a monthly newsletter, and a bi-weekly podcast. More than three dozen of Bernhardt’s students have subsequently published with major houses. He is also the owner of Balkan Press, which publishes poetry and fiction as well as the literary journal Conclave.
Bernhardt 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." He has been nominated for the Oklahoma Book Award eighteen times in three different categories, and has won the award twice. Library Journal called him “the master of the courtroom drama.” The Vancouver Sun called him “the American equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse and John Mortimer.”
In addition to his novels and poetry, he has written plays, a musical (book and score), humor, children stories, biography, and puzzles. He has edited two anthologies (Legal Briefs and Natural Suspect) as fundraisers for The Nature Conservancy and the Children’s Legal Defense Fund. OSU named him “Oklahoma’s Renaissance Man.”
In his spare time, he has enjoyed surfing, digging for dinosaurs, trekking through the Himalayas, paragliding, scuba diving, caving, zip-lining over the canopy of the Costa Rican rain forest, and jumping out of an airplane at 10,000 feet. In 2013, he became a Jeopardy! champion winning over $20,000.
When Bernhardt delivered the keynote address at the San Francisco Writers Conference, chairman Michael Larsen noted that in addition to penning novels, Bernhardt can “write a sonnet, play a sonata, plant a garden, try a lawsuit, teach a class, cook a gourmet meal, beat you at Scrabble, and work the New York Times crossword in under five minutes.”
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 9, 2017
Seemed like Bernhardt tried far too hard to squeeze in just about every historical character and major scene setting from the Dust Bowl. Didn't care for most of the characters - they were weakly developed. Halfway through the book, I gave up thinking it'd become a story that actually flowed and not just another scrape and another famous person in the next chapter. I enjoy Dust Bowl history, but this was far overdone caricature of the time and place (even for fiction); left me disappointed.
April 12, 2017
Fans of William Bernhardt's Ben Kinkaid series have surely noticed that thriller pyrotechnics threaten to overwhelm the detection elements in some of the later volumes. In this Depression era tale, Bernhardt unleashes his inner pulp fiction, creating cliff-hanger episodes as the protagonist (not Ben Kinkaid) and his cellmate travel from Guymon, OK to Cleveland and back. Ostensibly to find and return a doctor's missing daughter, they encounter a whole gallery of heroes and villains, with appearances by celebrities from Woody Guthrie to Amelia Earhart. Along the way, almost every imaginable threat to life and limb, with one of those climaxes where everyone arrives in the nick of time.
March 24, 2025
Oklahoma
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews