The Grapes of Wrath | Social Concerns
The Great Depression of the 1930s provides the material for Steinbeck's most important and most acclaimed novel. Set in the lush California valley country, the novel contrasts the Edenic natural state of the land with the abject poverty of the migrant workers who left the Midwest dust bowl region during those hard years to seek a better life where the land could sustain them. Steinbeck focuses on the social conditions that forced men to abandon their homeland in Oklahoma and other states: the growing encroachment of "absentee farmers," large corporations, and banks that bought up tracts...
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