Egan has written nine books. His first, ''The Good Rain'', won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award in 1991. For ''The Worst Hard Time'', a 2006 book about people who lived through the Great Depression's Dust Bowl, he won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Washington State Book Award in History/Biography. His book on the photographer Edward Curtis, "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher," won the 2013 Carnegie Medal for Excellence for nonfiction. ''The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America'' (2009) is about the Great Fire of 1910, which burned about three million acres (12,000 km2) and helped shape the United States Forest Service. The book describes some of the political issues facing Theodore Roosevelt. For this work he won a second Washington State Book Award in History/Biography and a second Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award.
