Genre: Classic
Length: 464 pages
First Published: 1939
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Publisher’s Description
First published in 1939, Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and 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. 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. 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.
Quotes from The Grapes of Wrath
There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do.
How can we live without our lives? How will we know it’s us without our past?
Death was a friend, and sleep was Death’s brother.
And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed.
About John Steinbeck
John Steinbeck was an American author who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. Steinbeck was born in 1902 in Salinas, California, whose works include Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden, Cannery Row, and The Old Man and the Sea. Steinbeck died in 1968 at the age of 66.
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