The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is an American realist novel written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939. The book won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and it was cited prominently when Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962.

The novel follows a family rather than an individual. The Joads are tenant farmers displaced from their Oklahoma home, and the reasons for their departure are given as a combination of weather, economics and bank decisions rather than any single disaster. They travel west along what the book calls the mother road with thousands of other families, and the journey is presented as a migration rather than an adventure.

What they find on arrival is a labour market already saturated. The novel's later movement puts the family into the conflicts between growers and organisers, and the Joads' consciences force them to leave a role as strikebreakers. Steinbeck's method mixes the family's story with passages of wider social commentary, and the book's reputation rests on that combination, which is why it is listed among the greatest American novels.