This fictional tale is based very much on actual events that are a part of history, as many headed to the West Coast after the Dust Bowl.Īccording to The New York Times it was the best-selling book of 1939 with more than 430,000 copies printed by February 1940. The Joads set out for California, along with thousands of other “Okies,” to find jobs, land, dignity, and a future. Set during the Great Depression, the story centers on the Joad family, poor tenant farmers driven from their Oklahoma home by drought, the Dust Bowl, and economic hardships resulting from the changes in the financial and agricultural industries. When Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962 the novel was referenced frequently. The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, was first published in 1939 and would achieve both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize that same year.
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