THE GRAPES OF WRATH – Novel by John Steinbeck

He was born in Salinas, California, on February day, 1902. Attended Stanford University without graduating (and though he lived briefly in New York), John Steinbeck remained a lifelong Californian. He began writing novels in 1929, and frequently used his fiction to delve into the lives of society’s most downtrodden citizens. A trio of novels in the late 1930s focused on the lives of migrant workers in California: In Dubious Battle, published in 1936, was followed by Of Mice and Men in 1937, and, in 1939, Steinbeck’s masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (considered part of the American literary canon, that in the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies).

A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s. The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads, driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

https://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-Centennial-John-Steinbeck/dp/0142000663