Oklahoma's twentieth-century history — the Land Runs, the Dust Bowl, the oil booms, the bombing — has produced a thicker literature than its population would suggest. Three books that an Oklahoma City visitor will get more out of the place for having read.
Boom Town — A New York Times Magazine writer spent five years embedded in Oklahoma City and produced this strange, brilliant, structurally inventive history of the place — woven together from chapters on the Land Run, the Murrah bombing, the May 1999 tornado, the city's purchase of the Seattle Supersonics, and the Oklahoma Thunder's run to the 2012 NBA finals. Russell Westbrook and Wayne Coyne are characters; so is the Oklahoma weather.
The best contemporary book about the city, with a generous and surprised affection for it that the residents recognise. Anyone visiting for more than a couple of days will get more out of every district they walk through for having read it.
The Grapes of Wrath — The Pulitzer-winning 1939 novel that defined the world's image of Dust Bowl Oklahoma — and arguably Oklahoma itself — for two generations. Steinbeck's Joad family, evicted from their Oklahoma farm in the great drought, drive west on Route 66 looking for work in California; what they find there is just as harsh as what they left.
Steinbeck was a Californian who covered the migrants for newspapers in the late 1930s, and Oklahomans have a complicated relationship with the book: there is gratitude for the empathy and irritation at the simplifications. Read it before driving Route 66 — Oklahoma City and the long, flat stretch west toward the Texas line is exactly the landscape the Joads cross in chapter twelve.
The Worst Hard Time — The definitive history of the Dust Bowl, narrated through the lives of a half-dozen families who stayed in the Oklahoma Panhandle and the surrounding plains when most others fled to California. Egan, a New York Times reporter, drew on hundreds of hours of interviews with the dwindling number of survivors and built the book around a single sustained idea — that the Dust Bowl was a man-made ecological disaster caused by the plough-up of native grassland during the wheat boom of the 1910s and 20s.
A useful counter-narrative to the Steinbeck-Okie-California version of the period. Anyone visiting Oklahoma History Center will understand the Dust Bowl gallery there much better for having read it first.