Books

24/04/1939. “The undersigned, Viking Press, Inc. and John Steinbeck hereby sells, grants, conveys and assigns to the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation…talking motion picture rights…that he may have in and to the original composition entitled “The Grapes of Wrath”…” A unique and compelling piece of American cinematic history “The Grapes of Wrath” won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for fiction in 1940 and helped John Steinbeck earn the Nobel Prize awarded him in 1962 (which turned on the “keen social perception” in this book). At the time of the Dust Bowl, when hundreds of thousands of Americans migrated to the West Coast (mainly California) in search of a better life, Steinbeck was writing a series of seven articles about migrant worker communities for the San Francisco Chronicle. He spent a lot of time getting to know families who lived in various migrant worker camps in towns like Bakersfield and Visalia, and was angered and disgusted by the…

The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck, is a powerful novel depicting the struggles of the Joad family during the Great Depression as they journey from Oklahoma to California in search of a better life.