The Grapes of Wrath is a novel published in 1939 and written by John Steinbeck, who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1940 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962. Set during the Great Depression, the novel focuses on the Joads, a poor family of sharecroppers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, economic hardship, and changes in financial and agricultural industries. Due to their nearly hopeless situation, and in part because they were trapped in the Dust Bowl, the Joads set out for California. Along with thousands of other "Okies", they sought jobs, land, dignity and a future. When preparing to write the novel, Steinbeck wrote: "I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this [the Great Depression and its effects]." The book won Steinbeck a large following among the working class, perhaps due to the book's sympathy to the worker's movement and its accessible prose style.
The Grapes of Wrath is frequently read in American high school and college literature classes. A celebrated Hollywood film version, starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford, was made in 1940; the endings of the book and the movie differ greatly.
John Steinbeck (1902 – 1968) was unarguably one of the best American writers of the 20th century. A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962, he is best known for his novella “Of Mice and Men” (1937) and his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Grapes of Wrath” (1939), both of which examine the lives of the working class and the migrant worker during the Great Depression. Steinbeck wrote in the naturalist style, portraying people as the center of his stories. His characters and his stories were taken from real life struggles in the first half of the 20th century. His body of work reflects his wide range of interests, including marine biology, jazz, politics, philosophy, history, and myth. Seventeen of his works, including “Cannery Row” and “The Pearl”, went on to become Hollywood films, and Steinbeck himself succeeded as a Hollywood writer, garnering an Academy Award nomination for Best Writing for Alfred Hitchcock's “Lifeboat”, in 1945. Steinbeck is also known as a regionalist, naturalist, mystic, proletarian writer, moved to anger by the brutality of the Depression.
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