1930's Lifestyles and Social Trends | The Grapes of Wrath

Novel

By: John Steinbeck

Date: 1939

Source: Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking Penguin, 1939; 1992, 3–7.

About the Author: John Steinbeck (1902–1968), California-born and Stanford-educated, wrote novels about working-class people in the West. The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of migrants from Oklahoma who try to escape the combined disaster of the Dust Bowl, Depression, and farm consolidation by heading for California. In 1940 Steinbeck received the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath. In 1962 he received the Nobel Prize for literature.

Introduction

Dust Bowl is a term that specifically applies to an area of western Oklahoma, western Kansas, and northern Texas that was frequently struck with severe dust storms in the 1930s. More generally, but perhaps less accurately, the term is applied to the entire Great...